Subprojects

Subproject 1: A Micro-phenomenology of Cinematic Beauty (Dr. Jakob Boer)

This subproject focuses on the empirical investigation of the audience experience of cinematic beauty. The project involves in-depth interviews with film viewers about their personal experiences of cinematic beauty. Rather than studying the objective properties of a beautiful film (what makes a film or scene beautiful), the project systematically explores the typical ways in which viewers respond to cinematic beauty (what it is like to experience beauty).

The study uses the method of micro-phenomenology, an interview method employing guided recall to explore bodily, emotional, and mental aspects of an experience in a high level of detail. The interview allows viewers to become aware of aspects of their own experience they normally do not focus on, and supports them in reporting on their experiences in descriptive and expressive ways (including verbal reporting and drawing). While it is true that it varies almost endlessly what individual viewers consider to be beautiful, the study hopes to uncover similarities in the way they respond if they find a moment, scene, or a whole film beautiful.

The project aims to develop and expand the vocabulary we have at our disposal for talking about beauty. This allows us to refine our understanding of the phenomenon as more than a mere superficial pleasure or evaluative judgement. Instead, the research intends to point to more profound and deeper layers of the experience that make beauty so meaningful and valuable to film viewers. If we find better words to describe our experience, we are better able to understand it and perhaps also develop and boost our experience in order to gain even more enjoyment from watching beautiful films.

The findings can also inform future research, as the new insights gained might also raise further questions that might be explored in the Cinematic Beauty project at later stages. The database of  participants’ selections of scenes or moments of intense beauty from various films enables film analytic work on the formal features that might trigger these experiences. For instance, elements such as cinematography, actors and acting, music, or storytelling might all play their part in engendering experiences of beauty. Which of these stylistic features do a general audience consider most beautiful? Another avenue of future research could be to connect the results from this study with neurophysiological measurements. This means measuring if viewers have bodily responses commonly associated with beauty experiences such as goosebumps, tears, activation and/or relaxation of the body (or parts), activation in certain brain regions, or modulations of attention and perception. 

Subproject 2: A Conceptual History of Cinematic Beauty (Lara Perski)

My project will explore these complexities of the important but understudied phenomenon of beauty in film, focusing on film theoretical and film critical writing.

Firstly, the project it will seek to define specifically cinematic beauty, seeing how it can be the result of a beautiful pro-filmic or be created by the film itself, as a result of a virtuous cinematographic work or through filmic material conditions, for instance. Following this analysis, my project will also investigate how cinematic beauty might differ from the concept of beauty as it was historically employed in art theory and philosophy and trace how our considerations of cinematic beauty have developed over time, producing what one might call a conceptual history of beauty in film.

To this goal, I will start with a comprehensive study of what early film theory has to say about beauty. The birth of film, unsurprisingly, prompted an avalanche of writing that reckoned with its promise and, sometimes, obligations. Although a lot of the early critics and theorists (who were often one and the same) focused on cinema’s dramatic or documentary nature, its educational potential, as well as its status as a moving image medium, they also acknowledge its very ability to record and project reality - and thus also the natural beauty of the world.

Likewise, its transformative power is lauded by writers such as Fernand Léger, Louis Aragon, Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein, who all share a fascination for cinema’s ability to depict objects and human faces in a way that highlights their inimitability and produce a striking effect called photogénie, which can be seen as a form of cinematic beauty.

The early film writers’ enthusiasm for beauty, however, was left unmatched in the subsequent film theoretical and critical work. Indeed, whereas in art theory and philosophy, the modernist discourse turns against beauty (Catherine Wesselinoff characterizes the sheer range of negative responses to beauty as a general anti-aesthetic trend or an “assault on beauty”), in film theory, beauty seemingly stops being of relevance. Indeed, the more contemporary film critical approaches, including those which base their principles on the film writing of the 1920s and 1930s, do not account for beauty. For instance, Kristin Thompson’s neoformalism sees defamiliarization, the ability to disrupt our familiar perceptual patterns, as the primary function of art, yet she does not mention beauty as a possible form of defamiliarization. What are the reasons for this disregard? Is the experience of beauty not capable of disrupting our perception?

Thus, the underlying goal of the dissertation will be to specifically interrogate the relationship of film criticism to beauty, to see how it affects our engagement with film and our understanding of the medium, and explore the ways in which considerations of beauty are part of our aesthetic judgment of film and whether beauty is or should be a criterion of evaluation.

Subproject 3: Experimenting with Beauty in the Avant-garde Cinema of State-Socialist Eastern Europe (Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia: 1964-1989) (Anna Doyle)

My proposed research is an exploration into the idea of beauty in avant-garde cinema during the era of Eastern European history known as “the Stagnation” period, (from 1964 to 1982) till the end of the Soviet Union (1989). The project aims to cover a film corpus ranging from Sergei Parajanov's first films up until Soviet Parallel Cinema in the late 1980s. It will analyze the discourses on beauty which appear in late experimental cinema in the region, and related criticism from the 1960s throughout the Cold War. The ideas of beauty may appear directly or indirectly behind other concepts such as amongst others, “pure form”, “tableaux aesthetics” “romantic ideal”, “cinema of poetry”, “illumination” and “the ornamental” etc. Their opposites, such as “bleakness”, “convulsive beauty”, “dissonance” or even “laziness.” show that despite their rejection of dominant or classical definitions of beauty, these ideas can hold a certain counterintuitive beauty. The filmmakers that will be studied come from different experimental film movements of socialist states of Eastern Europe, whether they are more institutionalized yet dissident filmmakers like Sergei Parajanov in the Caucasus, folk avant-gardism such as Juraj Jakubisko in Czechoslovakia, feminist filmmakers such as Sanja Iveković or abstract and poetic films coming out of the parallel underground film culture spreading across the Eastern Europe such as Ivan Martinac in Croatia or Petr Skala in Czechoslovakia.

The dissertation will not be a historical account of each film, but rather it will dissect the philosophical evolution of experiments in cinema in this region, characterized by aspirations for experimental form, new ideas of beauty and counter-beauties and their relation to social reality. The desire to renew political norms comes in tandem with these aspirations, the films often disrupting and elevating the materialist aesthetics of socialist realism. The fragmented and discontinuous quality of avant-garde film dislocates paradigms of resemblance and of figuration dominating ideological or canonical ideas of beauty. The search for new forms of beauty, whether formalist and contemplative, ‘convulsive’ and formless or even purely conceptual, invites us to reconsider the complexity of what lies behind the idea of a cinematic beauty, especially within avant-garde aesthetics.

My hypothesis is that looking at a Communist-era and peripheral example of cinema could illuminate why it is important for the category of beauty in the avant-garde to remain. In the Soviet context of non-Russian Republics and other countries of the State-Socialist Eastern Europe, a certain idea of beauty could offer an alternative to the status quo, when in socialist realist art the aesthetics of the useful, the radiant or the didactic are favoured.