Anna Doyle | Experimenting with beauty in avant-garde cinema from the Eastern Bloc (1964-1989)

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 the end of the Soviet Union. The project aims to cover a film corpus ranging from Sergei Paradjanov’s first films up until Soviet Parallel Cinema in the late 80s. It will analyze the discourses on beauty which appear in late experimental cinema of the Eastern bloc, and its criticism from the 1960s throughout the Cold War. The ideas of beauty may appear directly or indirectly behind other concepts such as “pure form”, “tableaux aesthetics” “romantic ideal”, “cinema of poetry”, and “the ornamental” etc. 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 Paradjanov in the Caucasus or coming out of the parallel kino-klub culture spreading across the Eastern Bloc. In this region, conceptual and radical filmmakers started community film groups such as the Polish Workshop of Film Form, the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, kinema-ikon in Romania, or Soviet Parallel Cinema in Russia. The dissertation will not be a historical monography of each film, but rather it will dissect the evolution of experiments in cinema in this region, characterized by aspirations for experimental form,new ideas of beauty and the creation of gaps in plastic norms. The desire to renew political norms comes in pair with these aspirations, the films often disrupting and elevating the materialist aesthetics of socialist realism. Grounding the study of beauty in a trans-national and inter-disciplinary perspective on the aesthetics of film implies that the contingent experiences of filmmaking will be analyzed prior to universalist philosophical traditions of studies of beauty.