Philosophy of Film

Memento mori is a broad and understudied cultural phenomenon and experience. The term "e;memento mori"e; is a Latin injunction that means "e;remember mortality,"e; or more directly, "e;remember that you must die."e; In art and cultural history, memento mori appears widely, especially in medieval folk culture and in the well-known Dutch still life vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet memento mori extends well beyond these points in art and cultural history. In Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience, Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter suggests that documentaries are an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori. Bennett-Carpenter shows that documentaries may offer composed transformative experiences in which a viewer may renew one's consciousness of mortality - and thus renew one's life.