Abstract
This chapter concerns two historical films both released in 2018 to widespread critical attention. Guadagnino's Suspiria remake revisits the cult horror about a dance academy in the Black Forest by relocating the action to a politically divided Berlin in the 1970s. Cold War tells the original story of a romance between a singer and a musicologist in the years 1949 to 1964 and across their European exile and their eventual return to communist Poland. Completely different in plot and style, the two films have important thing in common: they offer beauty as a form of historical understanding. The coincidence of beauty and morality may have purchase in modern times, where the prevailing notions of political reality owe to the unsentimental manipulations of Machiavelli and the brutal self-interest of Hobbes. The exploration of the sociological dynamics motivating beauty remains the case even as the film reveals its doomed romance to be as much the product of personal foibles as historical circumstances.
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