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Documenting the meticulously planned self-destruction of his family, a middle-class man writes the date of each member’s demise on a wall. But then he hesitates: what about his own?

A Christ-like figure tries to nail himself down on a cross, with one of his hands; yet that hand turns out to be uncapable of nailing itself down when no other limbs are left.

These are just two (taken from Michael Haneke’s 1989 The Seventh Continent and Carmelo Bene’s 1972 Salome) among countless possible examples of how fruitfully cinema has tackled the manifold, well-known, controversial and at times paradoxical philosophical implications of suicide (e.g. in relation to self-affection qua grounding of subjectivity), even down to producing actual, suicide-centred philosophies of time in a cinematic form (Je t’aime, Je t’aime, Alain Resnais, 1968).

The next issue of Cinema journal, however, sets out to investigate something different and more specific, namely the philosophical implications deriving from the way in which suicide has been portrayed on the screen. The focus, in other words, is less on the “what” than on the “how”, i.e. on the representation of suicide. Most notably, examples abound of cinematic depictions of suicide where aesthetics and ethics are hardly separable, for instance when the act is heard yet unshown and confined offscreen, as in Robert Bresson’s 1967 Mouchette (after painstakingly and empathetically following its preparation and failed attempts), or in some of the films by directors in dialogue with Bresson’s legacy, like Takeshi Kitano (Hana-Bi, 1997).

Somewhat tellingly, the chapter on suicide in Michele Aaron’s groundbreaking Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I is as ready to acknowledge that cinematic suicide is a formidable catalyst for so many ideological frameworks of the class/gender/race/etc. varieties, as it is to stress the relevance of formal, aesthetic features therein – e.g. the “vanishing point” in Hany Abu-Assad’s 2005 Paradise, Now.

This reference to a crucial notion of optics and of visual arts at large is revealing of how inseparable, in cinema in general and in cinematic suicide in particular, form and spectatorship are, and it is again not accidental that the investigations on the relationships between cinema and suicide have recently undergone a recognizably spectatorship-oriented shift (especially through the work of Alessandra Seggi). That cinematic form is first and foremost a matter of positioning the spectator in a certain way with respect to what is shown on the screen is an assumption that finds a particularly fitting exemplification in instances of cinematic suicide: what are the means at cinema’s disposal to handle spectatorial identification with such an extreme gesture? How can cinema make the inexplicability, the “privacy” of it relatable without being pornographic or voyeuristic?

We are interested, in other words, in exploring the wide spectrum comprised between the extreme externality, bluntness and objectivity of Edmund’s self-imposed fall in Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) and the extreme subjectivity of Lola Montès’s final, ambiguously semi-suicidal leap downward, shown from her optical point of view in Max Ophuls’s eponymous 1955 film – two jumps possibly, ideally merged together in the little-known I Knew Her Well (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965). Our goal is to gather essays examining the philosophical implications of suicide through the lens of cinematic forms, where such lens should be intended as a reflection on how aesthetics combines with ethics as well as on the ways for moving images to be put together so as to establish a certain kind of exclusion/inclusion of the spectator. Case studies (ideally one – or a limited number anyway – closely analysed, per essay) may range from blatantly formalistic ones (e.g. three characters gazing the viewer through the camera upon hearing the gunshot whereby Camilo Castelo Branco just shot himself offscreen, in Manoel de Oliveira’s 1992 Day of Despair) to others no less form-driven yet more subtly nestled in films seemingly approaching suicide mainly from the side of content (e.g. Sono Sion’s 2001 Suicide Club and 2005 Noriko’s Dinner Table).

Documentaries (e.g. the now well-known The Bridge, Eric Steel, 2006) or tv series may also be considered, yet the focus should remain firmly on the representation of suicide in both aesthetic and philosophical terms. More unconventional approaches may also be considered, provided that their significance is both aesthetic and philosophical - for instance, one might compare the way in which Yukio Mishima staged his own death with cinematic representations of it, such as Paul Schrader’s 1985 Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters or Koji Wakamatsu’s 2012 11:25, The Day He Chose His Own Fate.

 

Submissions will be accepted in English and Portuguese, and can be sent to the editors at cjpmi@fcsh.unl.pt. Prospective authors should submit a short CV along with an abstract. Abstracts (max. 400 words) are due on 31 December 2026.

A selection of authors will be invited to submit full-length articles by 30 May 2027, according to the journal’s guidelines. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee publication, since all articles will be subject to double blind peer-review.

For further information or questions about this special issue, please contact the editors, or visit the website.