[Commlist] CFP: O Beauty, Where Art Thou? In Search of the Beautiful in Film (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 in-creased 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 
be-yond—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 (cinematic.beauty /at/ rug.nl) 
<mailto:(cinematic.beauty /at/ 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 Phenome-non, 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 BIBLIOGRAHPY
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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