The Aesthetic Status of Disgust in Cinematic Experience: The Case of the Comedy Genre

The subject of the study is the causes and ethical-aesthetic consequences of the borderline nature of disgust as a cinematic experience. The analysis of emotions, experiences, and disgust has a long history in aesthetics, ethics, phenomenology, and other fields of philosophy and science. The aim of the research is to determine the aesthetic status of disgust in the experience of art and cinema. With a substantial source-based and art historical foundation, existing works on disgust and various film genres establish hierarchical relationships between ethical and aesthetic concepts. In studies on disgust written in Russian and English, interest in it is driven by the value and anti-aesthetic role of related concepts such as the horrifying, the ugly, the grotesque, and the disgusting. It is argued that the analysis of both the essence and the metaphor of the experience of disgust in art and cinema reflects aesthetic sensitivity to the different facets of the object and reinforces the ethical evaluation of the viewer. The method of the study involves analyzing disgust in film and a comparative examination of the ethics and aesthetics of the disgusting in comedies from the 1960s to the 2020s. Relying on philosophical, experimental, and psychological aesthetics, the thesis regarding the incompatibility of disgust with aesthetics and ethics is revisited, as well as the idea that the disgusting is a genre-forming element primarily of horror films. The scientific novelty of the research is expressed in the thesis that aesthetic disgust, primarily in genre cinema, takes the form of analysis, and the causes of the intensity and the ethical-aesthetic effect of disgust are due to its specificity. This specificity lies in the lack of inherent content in this experience apart from the disgusting nature of the object itself or in comparison to other aesthetic feelings. It is concluded that if, in several areas of contemporary ethics, a temporary delay as moral inaction is equated with a transgression, then in the theory and practice of film analysis, reflection and aesthetic judgment about the visual and sound solutions of films as disgusting requires time. Sometimes comedies from the second half of the 20th century become exemplary and cult not in their initial reception, but more than half a century after their release.

disgust, cinematic experience, aesthetics of the disgusting, sensitivity, comedy, genre, comparative analysis, Soviet cinema, film theory, art