Cinematic Beauty

Exploring the Experience of a Major Aesthetic Phenomenon

Prof. Dr. Julian Hanich, Dr. Jakob Boer, Anna Doyle and Lara Perski / Centre for Arts in Society

This project begins with the observation that the experience of beauty has had affective appeal for film viewers since the very beginning of cinema. Cinematic beauty is a pleasurable feeling—some would say an aesthetic emotion—that audiences experience when they encounter beauty on the screen (for endnotes see B3 below). They may feel enraptured by the beauty of nature depicted in film; enchanted by the artistic beauty of colours, music, composition, staging, lighting, rhythm, and movement; or hold their breath when confronted by the human beauty of actors and actresses. Nor is cinematic beauty restricted to certain types or genre of film: viewers can experience beauty in all of film’s forms and modalities—from short to feature films, fiction films to documentaries, animation to live-action movies, mainstream movies to avant-garde experiments. Beauty can also be encountered in moving images beyond film (and thus outside the range of what this project will investigate): music videos, commercials, YouTube clips, GIFs, TikTok posts and other user-generated content, cutscenes in video games, and so forth. The experience of cinematic beauty is something with which we are all familiar.

And yet, we know virtually nothing about it.

The recent “turn to spectatorship” in film studies has generated sustained attempts to map the various aspects of the film experience, be they unconscious, conscious, hermeneutic, cognitive, behavioural, emotional, affective, moral, consumerist, imaginative, or recollective, among others. Thanks to this scholarship, we now have a robust understanding of cinematic emotions such as disgust and how mental acts such as imagination are involved in spectatorship. Numerous theoretical and methodological schools have participated in this effort—from psychoanalytic, cognitivist, semio-pragmatic, and phenomenological film theory to new film history and empirical audience reception studies—while film scholars with backgrounds in psychology and neuroscience have more recently joined the field. But astonishingly, what remains entirely under-studied is the experience of one of the most fundamental of aesthetic phenomena: beauty. What makes this lack of research even more perplexing are the far-reaching societal, political, existential, and well-being benefits that may accompany the experience of cinematic beauty. The proposed project is the first to address this lacuna in our knowledge—and it will be built on three pillars: a qualitative-empirical pillar, a film-historical pillar, and a film-philosophical pillar.

Project website: Cinematic Beauty

AFREXTRACT

Environmental Histories of Resource Extraction in Africa: Understanding Cultural and Political Responses to Environmental Transformation

Dr. Iva Peša / Centre for International Relations Research

Resource extraction industries on the African continent have experienced an immense boom during the 20th century, leaving drastic environmental changes in their wake. Intensive gas and oil exploration, and gold and copper mining have dramatically changed the landscape, severely polluting the soil, water and air in many African countries. Environmental degradation has elicited numerous responses, from those who simply accepted that pollution was a fact of life, to those moving onto active resistance to oppose it. The AFREXTRACT comparative study is an in-depth exploration of how communities in Nigeria, Zambia and South Africa have responded to environmental transformations, induced by resource extractive industries, in their cultural expressions and through popular politics.

Although the resource extractive industries have caused pollution in many areas, local people’s responses to such contaminations have differed significantly. Whereas the people in the Zambian Copperbelt have glorified copper as ‘red gold’ while seemingly accepting the realities of living near polluting mines, the people of the Nigerian Niger Delta have violently protested about the decades of oil spills, referring to the petroleum industry as being actively complicit in ‘ecocide’. Similar protests have recently emerged in South Africa, where people’s environmental protests had long been curbed by the Apartheid regime. People in these areas have expressed their responses to environmental change both culturally, through music and literature, and politically, through active resistance. The aim of AFREXTRACT is to highlight the lived experiences of three African communities and their relationships with their natural environment.

Project website: AFREXTRACT

Documenting Complexity

Prof. Dr Tamara Witschge / Centre for Media and Journalism Studies

Documentary Complexity traces the intersection of documentary and activism. Employing a multi-methodological and practice-led approach, we work towards a bottom-up understanding of how documentary makers use new technologies and intersectional strategies for their activist and artistic aims.

This collaborative research project brings together researchers, artists, documentary filmmakers, curators, activists, and journalists – and is committed to creating better relationships between academia, cultural institutions, and practitioners. Together, we contribute to educational programmes, co-organise screenings and workshops, work towards open-access resources, and practice collective thinking and making.

Project website: Documenting Complexity

Biografieproject 'Vier Vorstinnen'

dr. Leonieke Vermeer / Centre for Historical Studies

Ruim tien jaar na de verschijning van de alom bejubelde Koningsbiografieën (Koning Willem I door Jeroen Koch, Koning Willem II door Jeroen van Zanten en Koning Willem III door Dik van der Meulen) verschijnen o.v. vanaf begin 2027 de Vorstinnenbiografieën. Alpita de Jong schrijft de biografie van Wilhelmina van Pruisen, Petra van Langen van Anna Paulowna, Leonieke Vermeer van Sophie van Wurtemberg en Monica Soeting van Emma van Waldeck-Pyrmont.

De levens van Wilhelmina 'Mimi van Pruisen (1774-1837), Anna Paulowna (1795-1865), Sophie van Wurtemberg (1818-1877) en Emma van Waldeck-Pyrmont (1858-1934) zullen centraal staan. Niet alleen de afkomst van deze prinsessen en hun opvoeding aan verschillende Europese hoven zullen worden onderzocht, maar ook en vooral hun rol als vorstin aan het Nederlandse hof. Door hun buitenlandse afkomst brachten zij gebruiken en gewoonten mee die de Nederlandse monarchie mede gestalte gaven en vormden deze vorstinnen tevens een schakel tussen het Nederlandse koningshuis en de Europese vorstenhuizen.

Zie ook: Boomgeschiedenis.nl

New Political Geographies of Large-Scale Economic Infrastructures"

Dr Jana Hönke / Centre for International Relations Research

Traditional conceptions of state and territoriality no longer capture newly emerging political topographies. As economic activity so does politics take place in and through multiple sites and connections. Approaching the political geographies that emerge around transnational economic activity through conceptual lenses of absence and failure has proven limiting and misleading. This project suggests, instead, that it is the very areas associated with absence and failure that reveal newly emerging configurations of political ordering.

Sites and technologies of transnational economic activity provide particularly insightful starting points to explore such political geographies. Examining global infrastructures of production, transport and distribution, and practices of securing such activities and their spatial manifestations, brings to light emerging spatialities of power and politics that are crucial for understanding the future of world politics.

Soundtoll Registers Online

Dr Jan Willem Veluwenkamp & Dr. Anjana Singh / Centre for Historical Studies

In close co-operation with Tresoar, the Frisian Historical and Literary Centre, Leeuwarden, an electronic database for the complete Sound Toll Registers is being realised. This dataset is a valuable source for economic and social historians. The toll entries can be used to trace changes in consumption patterns and economic development, for instance, but it could also shed light on the composition and structure of sailer communities.

Website: www.soundtoll.nl

‘Cultural Narratives of Crisis & Renewal’

Prof. Dr Pablo Valdivia (president steering committee) / Centre for Arts in Society

This European Commission H2020 Marie Curie RISE Excellent Science project addresses the scarcity of scientific research on cultural narratives elaborated around conjunctures of crisis and renewal with a particular focus on the period marked by what has been termed the ‘neoliberal turn’: from its violent implementation in Latin America in the 1970s, to its questioning at our current historical conjuncture, in the continuing aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. This is a collaboration project between several international universities.

Website: www.culturalnarratives.co.uk