A subjective, not very philosophical interjection may be allowed.
When someone tells me such and such a film is beautiful, I'm immediately suspicious. It sounds like a euphemism to me. Or like a misplaced judgment. When a film is praised for its beautiful cinematography that usually implies that it has failed on some more general level. Maybe this is because I associate beauty with the unblemished and immaculate, and being such is imho anathema to the dramatic.
On the other hand, one would expect some discourses on beauty in star studies and related work on stardom and celebrity - though possibly not of a very philosophical nature.
H
> I find the beautiful an important concept in thinking about film, althought I don't know exactly how the concept is used in English. I refer to the beatiful in connection with Cavell's interpretation with Kantian aesthetics, which I find very interesting as a means to understand the way we talk about movies or artworks we like. Kant says, that whenever we find something beautiful, meaning more than just aggreable for 'me', we feel compelled to convince others to find it beautiful too, although it is still a subjective feeling and judgement that cannot be shared with others. We do this although we know better. (see "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" in Cavell's "Must We Mean What We Say" and §7 and 8 of Kant's Critique of Judgement). For Cavell, there are close links between Kant and everyday language philosophy, treating the way we are used to talk about things as facts of our life forms. But Cavell takes the notion further, aligning, as I understand it, the beautiful with the entertaining (in his readings of classical Hollywood comedies), feeling the same urge to tell others that something was beautiful or entertaining or simply good.
> I am not really sure about this, but I think that I am very often inclined to claim that I find a film beautiful the same way I find it entertaining or good, but the term beautiful would then mean, that I wasn't able to find the film only beautiful for me, so I have to address myself to others and try to convince them of the qualities of a film (for the same reasons I get angry, really angry about films I don't find beautiful or entertaining or find simply wrong). I like Kant's concept of the beautiful also for a pragmatic or functional reason: Although I am supposed to be a media scholar I don't think its is useful to be indifferent (or objective) towards films.
> Therefore I am very interested in this discussion and I will repeat the question raised here: Does the concept of the beautiful mean that something is more than just good for me, does it mean that we will have to go beyond the limits of our subjectivity in order to try to find a common ground for our subjecitive feelings about a film? (Which also means that we expose ourselves to others).
>
> Herbert
>
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