On the Paradoxical Status of Aesthetics in Film Studies
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
On the one hand, there are, within film studies, few explicit, sustained discussions of aesthetics. On the other hand, as Daniel Morgan (2022) has observed, the casual use of the terms “aesthetics of x” and “x aesthetics” has proliferated within the discipline. The apparent paradox can be dissolved if we think about film scholars’ use of the term aesthetics,in formulations like “x aesthetics” and “the aesthetics of x,” as basically just meaning form and/or style. We hypothesize that this use of the term has more to do with a desire to avoid the perceived negative connotations of form and formalism than an interest in aesthetics in a more robust sense – as involving normative matters including appreciation and evaluation. We will argue that, in fact, Noel Carroll’s (2003) functional account of film form gives scholars an attractive way to ground their claims about how films function ideologically or politically.
