Cinematic Beauty

Cinematic beauty is the pleasurable affective response that audiences experience when they consider a film beautiful. Since the beginning of cinema, movie-goers have encountered beauty in film’s many forms and genres, ranging from fiction films and animation to documentaries and avant-garde experiments. But astonishingly, scholars of film have never systematically studied cinematic beauty—a neglect all the more striking as the experience of cinematic beauty may have societal, political and existential functions while encouraging well-being and pro-sociality. This project will investigate how cinematic beauty feels and what makes the experience valuable, both to individuals and society.

Project description

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 (see subprojects).