Shapes of Aesthetics: Olfactory, Cinematic, and Social

This volume is organised around three main themes explored in a series of individual studies. On the one hand, I build on the phenomenological approach to film festivals developed in my doctoral research. Films are intrinsic to film festivals, and I became aware of local film cultures coagulating around productions of national cinemas during my fieldwork at an international film festival in Romania. Also, I took an interest in films that appeared to have a rather fluctuating and ineffable audience base: contemporary extreme cinema. I was curious about how filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe would fit this trend defined by a dependence on the festival circuit and by the affective and cognitive challenges posed by individual films (Frey 2016). In parallel, my broader interest in fragrance cultures has led me to adopt a post-phenomenological approach, focusing on perfume-reviewing practices and
online fragrance communities.