This research paper tries to study the film texts of the French philosopher Alain Badiou with the objective of subtracting the role of cinema in his project of (re)starting Philosophy. We have divided this research into two parts: the study of his (re)starting philosophical project, and the study of the role of cinema in this project as well as of his implicit film theory. 

In the first part we will try to justify to what extent his project can be understood as an attempt to vindicate the philosophical task as the eternal task of educating to think the contemporaneity in a universal way. Badiou states that contemporary philosophy must arise as a process of egalitarian transmission of the Idea of the present after the thought of the twentieth century declared its death. This process is determined by three dimensions: a real dimension which makes philosophy conditional on the presentation of the truths (or subjective figures) of present as immanent bodies inside a concrete situation; a symbolic dimension which makes philosophy conditional on the objective presentation of the generic and exceptional logic of these truths in accordance with a dominant logic; and an imaginary dimension which makes philosophy conditional on the persuasive and affective presentation of this discourse. 

In the second part, we will show the role of cinema in this concept of philosophy. Our main objective is to present a hypothesis to read Badiou’s film texts according to the research done in the previous section. This way, Badiou’s approach to cinema and art in general bursts into the way philosophy from the twentieth century has thought both fields. According to Badiou, cinema, as art in general, is a field which can produce truths and therefore condition the philosophical task. However, the philosophical virtue of cinema, unlike other arts, lies mainly in its ability to be an impure mass art: on the one hand, cinema is for masses because, with some exceptions, it subtracts its images from popular images of the world; on the other hand, cinema is an impure art because it can produce post-event thoughts in its own field from other artistic thoughts. So, since cinema is a mass art, it can «democratize» the «aristocratic» thought produced by the rest of arts. Eventually, we will finish this research showing how film texts present the field of cinema as the proper field for the construction of the real, symbolic and imaginary dimensions: the real dimension, since it offers a particular situation in which truths can happen; the symbolic dimension, because its truths can be described with the objectivity required by the egalitarian pedagogical scene. Finally, the imaginary dimension, because it offers fictional figures analogous to make the philosophical task more persuasive.