Abstract

The relationship between film and philosophy has been a strong presence in theoretical debates since the 1950s. How can films as artefacts contribute to philosophical discourse? The aim of this paper is to explore the convergence between the recent works of a film director (Giuseppe Tornatore) and a philosopher (Maurizio Ferraris). Tornatore's "The Best Offer" is the story of a man who has feelings for female portraits as they were real women; Ferraris thinks that a work of art is a special kind of object that acts like a subject, whom he defines «The Automatic Girlfriend». "The Correspondence" is a romantic drama about a woman who keeps receiving messages, emails, packages from her lover, even after he has died; this issue is deeply connected with some aspects of the documentality theory put forward by Ferraris. The two films by Tornatore work as examples of Ferraris's philosophical questions, in a case of dialectical film philosophy.