CfP: O Beauty, Where Art Thou? In Search of the Beautiful in Film

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Hanich, J.

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Apr 20, 2026, 9:31:28 AMApr 20
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International Conference: Call for Papers

O Beauty, Where Art Thou? In Search of the Beautiful in Film

1-3 April 2027
University of Groningen (The Netherlands)

Abstract submission deadline: 1 September 2026

Keynote Speakers
  • Rosalind Galt (King’s College London)
  • Adrian Martin (Independent Scholar, Spain)
  • Lúcia Nagib (University of Reading)
  • Jordan Schonig (UC Santa Barbara)

Beauty is lacking in film studies. While early film theorists still had a keen eye for it, beauty mostly disappeared from film critical analyses in subsequent decades. And even though occasional advances have been made in recent years (Marcus 2006; Wiegand 2018; Williams 2019; Zuo 2022; Hanich 2023, 2024; Kerner 2023), there is still no sustained investigation of this major aesthetic phenomenon. This is astonishing given the importance beauty has played in the history of cinema. Over the last decades widely admired directors—from Todd Haynes, Wong Kar-wai, Céline Sciamma, and Barry Jenkins to Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Paolo Sorrentino, Shirin Neshat and Terrence Malick—have continued the long-standing exploration of beauty’s aesthetic and affective force.

But the neglect of beauty is striking also because several recent developments in film studies and beyond have made it ripe for reinvigoration. First, the last decades have witnessed the rise in prominence of filmic modes favoring what is key in many definitions of beauty: contemplation. What has been dubbed ‘slow cinema,’ ‘eco-cinema,’ and ‘meditative film’ is not necessarily beautiful, but in the case of directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, or Peter Hutton beauty—and specifically natural beauty—becomes an integral part of what their films are about. Second, not only have aesthetic categories such as the pretty, the weird, the eerie, the wondrous or the sublime received increased attention in film studies (Galt 2011; Fisher 2016; Koepnick 2017; Carroll 2020), but film scholarship has witnessed a striking return of aesthetics and form more generally. Important monographs have rediscovered philosophical aesthetics (Yacavone 2015; Schonig 2022; Hven 2022); and, coming from literary studies, New Formalism has reached the study of the moving image (Brinkema 2014; Levine 2015). Third, over the last two decades, we have seen a transdisciplinary rediscovery of beauty in the humanities ranging from philosophical aesthetics and literary studies to art history (Nehamas 2007; Moore 2008; Levinson 2011; Scruton 2011; Zangwill 2018; Hogan 2016; Jacob 2012; Eco 2010; Marwick 2007; Prettejohn 2005). This can be noticed also among famous Black intellectuals such as Zadie Smith, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Robert Gooding-Williams. These interventions have underscored that a blanket distrust of beauty in the arts is unwarranted. Not least, we can also observe a strong interest in beauty among scholars in quantitative disciplines such as empirical aesthetics, psychology of art, and neuroaesthetics (Brielmann et al. 2021; Chatterjee 2014; Diessner 2019; Hogan 20216; Omigie et al . 2021; Skov and Nadal 2021; Starr 2013), even though films have yet to play a decisive role in their studies.

This conference tries to make amends by taking a close look at beauty in film.

Of course, the concept is not easy to pin down. Some philosophers therefore call it an ambiguous concept. On the one hand, it is understood fairly widely as a synonym for ‘aesthetic value,’ ‘aesthetic liking,’ or ‘aesthetic pleasure.’ On the other hand, it designates something more specific: an aesthetic category comparable to—but ultimately different from—the pretty, the sublime, the cute, kitsch etc. (De Clercq 2013). We are decidedly interested in beauty narrowly defined and aim to avoid broad identifications of beauty with everything that gives rise to aesthetic pleasure (for recent philosophical attempts to define beauty in the narrow sense, see Paris 2025, Doran 2025, Evers/Hanich forthcoming).

Another aim of the conference is to highlight the potentially progressive side of cinematic beauty: Are there perhaps more far-ranging gains connected to the experience of cinematic beauty beyond the pleasurable feeling it evokes? Might it even have societal impact, political effects, existential functions, and result in well-being and contribute to prosociality? Restoring a more affirmative view on this long-ignored phenomenon may be appropriate in our historical moment of looming climate catastrophe, political upheavals, and wars in Europe and beyond—developments experienced by many as a depressing stream of apocalyptic scenarios.

However, this is certainly not to say that we reject critical voices wary of the potentially normative, elitist, or sexist implications of beauty. We therefore also invite postcolonial, feminist and other critical-theory approaches to cinematic beauty.

Ultimately, we are interested in various takes, be they historical, theoretical, philosophical, or empirical. Papers may address but are not restricted to the following topics:

  • Beauty in film theory: What traces of beauty can we find in the history of film studies, from early film theory to contemporary film philosophy?
  • Beauty and its absence: What reasons drove film scholars to put a blind eye on beauty?
  • Beauty and its cognate concepts: How does beauty relate to photogénie, cinephilia, poetic cinema etc.?
  • Beauty and its types: How do natural beauty, human beauty, moral beauty etc. manifest themselves in film and how does the filmic medium shape them?
  • Beauty and its varieties: What cultural or ethical variations of beauty have left their traces in the history of global cinema?
  • Beauty and its opposites: What distinguishes a beautiful film from a pretty, cute, sublime, ugly, or kitschy one?
  • Beauty and its effects: What positive (or negative) ethical, political, existential, or well-being effects could beauty have on spectators?
  • Beauty and specific modes of filmmaking: Where do we find beauty in documentary film, avant-garde/experimental film, home movies, music videos etc.?
  • Beauty and its auteurs: Which filmmakers have relied on beauty and to what end?
  • Beauty and its production: What do filmmakers do to evoke experiences of beauty?
  • Beauty and aesthetic evaluation: How does film criticism account for beauty and how does it relate to evaluative criteria of film?

Please send a short bio of 250 words and an abstract of 400-500 words with 5 key bibliographical sources to cinemati...@rug.nl. Abstract submission deadline: 1 September 2026. Acceptance notifications will be sent out by the end of September 2026. Please note the conference will be held in person not hybrid format. Travel and accommodation expenses are to be covered by the participants. Selected papers will be published in an edited volume.

This conference is organized by Julian Hanich, Jakob Boer and Lara Perski from the research project Cinematic Beauty: Exploring the Experience of a Major Aesthetic Phenomenon, located at the University of Groningen and funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

We would be grateful if you could circulate this call within your networks. We look forward to your submissions and participation.

Select Bibliography
  • Aenne A. Brielmann, Angelica Nuzzo, and Denis G. Pelli. “Beauty, the Feeling.” Acta Psychologica. No. 219, 2021.
  • Eugenie Brinkema. The Forms of the Affects. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.
  • Nathan Carroll ed. The Cinematic Sublime: Negative Pleasures, Structuring Absences. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2020.
  • Anjan Chatterjee. The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art. Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • Rafael De Clercq. “Beauty.” in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2013.
  • Arthur C. Danto. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago: Open Court, 2003.
  • Rhett Diessner. Understanding the Beauty Appreciation Trait: Empirical Research on Seeking Beauty in All Things. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
  • Ryan P. Doran. “True Beauty.” British Journal of Aesthetics. 2025.
  • Umberto Eco. On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea. London: MacLehose, 2010.
  • Daan Evers and Julian Hanich. “Beauty as a Specific Aesthetic Concept: A Response to Panos Paris.” British Journal of Aesthetics (forthcoming).
  • Mark Fisher. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater, 2016.
  • Rosalind Galt. Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
  • Robert Gooding-Williams. “Beauty as Propaganda: On the Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Philosophical Topics. Vol. 49, no. 1, 2021.
  • Byung-Chul Han. Saving Beauty. Cambridge: Polity, 2018.
  • Julian Hanich. “Striking Beauty: On Recuperating the Beautiful in Cinema”. In: Julian Hanich/Martin Rossouw (eds.): What Film Is Good For: On the Ethics of Spectatorship. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.
  • Julian Hanich. “When the Wind Is Gently Rustling: Film and the Aesthetics of Natural Beauty.” Film-Philosophy. Vol. 28, No. 2, 2024.
  • Saidiya Hartman. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: Norton, 2019.
  • Steffen Hven. Enacting the Worlds of Cinema. New York: Oxford UP, 2022.
  • Patrick Colm Hogan. Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.
  • Joachim Jacob. Die Schönheit der Literatur. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2012.
  • Aaron Kerner. Abject Pleasures in the Cinematic: The Beautiful, Sexual Arousal, and Laughter. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.
  • Lutz P. Koepnick. The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
  • Caroline Levine. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015.
  • Jerrold Levinson. “Beauty is Not One: The Irreducible Variety of Visual Beauty,” in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, ed. by Elisabeth Schellekens/Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.
  • Laura Marcus. “‘A New Form of True Beauty’: Aesthetics and Early Film Criticism.” Modernism/Modernity. Vol. 13, no. 2, 2006.
  • Arthur Marwick. History of Human Beauty. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.
  • Achille Mbembe. “Variations on the Beautiful in Congolese Worlds of Sound,” in Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, ed. by Sarah Nuttall. Cape Town: Kwela, 2006.
  • Ronald Moore. Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008.
  • Alexander Nehamas. Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.
  • Diana Omigie, Klaus Frieler, Christian Bär, R. Muralikrishnan, Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, and Timo Fischinger. “Experiencing Musical Beauty: Emotional Subtypes and Their Physiological and Musico-Acoustic Correlates.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Vol. 15, no. 2, 2021.
  • Panos Paris. “On Beauty and Wellformedness.” British Journal of Aesthetics. Vol. 65, no. 2, 2025.
  • Elizabeth Prettejohn. Beauty and Art 1750-2000. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
  • Crispin Sartwell. Six Names of Beauty. London: Routledge, 2004.
  • Elaine Scarry. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.
  • Jordan Schonig. The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement. New York: Oxford UP, 2022.
  • Roger Scruton. Beauty: A Very Brief Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.
  • Christina Sharpe. “Beauty Is a Method.” e-flux. No. 105, 2019.
  • Martin Skov, and Marcos Nadal. “The Nature of Beauty: Behavior, Cognition, and Neurobiology.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1488, no. 1, 2021.
  • Zadie Smith. On Beauty: A Novel. New York: Penguin, 2005.
  • Starr, G. Gabrielle. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. The MIT Press, 2013.
  • Wendy Steiner. Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Free Press, 2001.
  • Daniel Wiegand. “Tableaux Vivants, Early Cinema, and Beauty-As-Attraction.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies. Vol. 15, no. 1, 2018.
  • James S. Williams. Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema: The Politics of Beauty. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
  • Daniel Yacavone. Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema. New York: Columbia UP, 2015.
  • Nick Zangwill. The Metaphysics of Beauty. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2018.
  • Mila Zuo. Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
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