Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty
Moving image culture seems to privilege the instantly identifiable: the recognizable face, the well-timed stunt, the perfectly synchronized line of dialogue. Yet perfect, in-focus visibility does not come ‘naturally’ to the moving image, and if there is one visual effect the eye of the camera can record better than the human eye it is blur. Looking beyond popular media to works of experimental cinema and video art, this groundbreaking collection addresses the aesthetics and politics of moving images in states of decay, distortion, indistinctness and fragmentation. A range of international scholars examines what is at stake in these images’ sometimes radical foregrounding of materiality and mediation, or of evanescence and spectrality, as well as their challenging of the dominant position accorded to ‘legible’ images. How have artists and filmmakers rendered the ‘indefinite’ image, and what questions does it pose? With a range of approaches, from aesthetics to phenomenology to production studies, the authors in this volume investigate techniques, themes and concepts that emerge from this wilful excavation of the moving image’s material base.
1124016609
Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty
Moving image culture seems to privilege the instantly identifiable: the recognizable face, the well-timed stunt, the perfectly synchronized line of dialogue. Yet perfect, in-focus visibility does not come ‘naturally’ to the moving image, and if there is one visual effect the eye of the camera can record better than the human eye it is blur. Looking beyond popular media to works of experimental cinema and video art, this groundbreaking collection addresses the aesthetics and politics of moving images in states of decay, distortion, indistinctness and fragmentation. A range of international scholars examines what is at stake in these images’ sometimes radical foregrounding of materiality and mediation, or of evanescence and spectrality, as well as their challenging of the dominant position accorded to ‘legible’ images. How have artists and filmmakers rendered the ‘indefinite’ image, and what questions does it pose? With a range of approaches, from aesthetics to phenomenology to production studies, the authors in this volume investigate techniques, themes and concepts that emerge from this wilful excavation of the moving image’s material base.
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Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty

Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty

Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty

Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty

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Overview

Moving image culture seems to privilege the instantly identifiable: the recognizable face, the well-timed stunt, the perfectly synchronized line of dialogue. Yet perfect, in-focus visibility does not come ‘naturally’ to the moving image, and if there is one visual effect the eye of the camera can record better than the human eye it is blur. Looking beyond popular media to works of experimental cinema and video art, this groundbreaking collection addresses the aesthetics and politics of moving images in states of decay, distortion, indistinctness and fragmentation. A range of international scholars examines what is at stake in these images’ sometimes radical foregrounding of materiality and mediation, or of evanescence and spectrality, as well as their challenging of the dominant position accorded to ‘legible’ images. How have artists and filmmakers rendered the ‘indefinite’ image, and what questions does it pose? With a range of approaches, from aesthetics to phenomenology to production studies, the authors in this volume investigate techniques, themes and concepts that emerge from this wilful excavation of the moving image’s material base.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781474407144
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication date: 07/18/2017
Series: Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality
Pages: 384
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Martine Beugnet is Professor in Visual Studies at the University of Paris 7 Diderot.

Allan Cameron Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland

Arild Fetveit is Associate Professor in the Department for Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen.

Table of Contents

Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty

  • Martine Beugnet - Introduction

Illuminations

  • Jacques Aumont – The Veiled Image: The Luminous Formless
  • Richard Misek – The Black Screen
  • Tom Gunning – Flicker and Shutter: Exploring Cinema’s Shuddering Shadow

Definitions

  • Martin Jay – Genres of Blur
  • Giusy Pisano – In Praise of the Sound Dissolve: Evanescences, Uncertainties, Fusions, Resonances
  • Erika Balsom – 100 Years of Low Definition

Frames

  • Michel Chion – Jumps in Scale
  • Julian Hanich – Reflecting on Reflections: Complex Mirror Shots in Films
  • Christa Blümlinger – Cinematic Indeterminacy According to Peter Tscherkassky: Coming Attractions
  • Carol Vernallis – Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime: Partying in The Great Gatsby

Temporalities

  • D.N.Rodowick – The Force of Small Gestures
  • Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli – Bill Viola and the Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience
  • Catherine Fowler – Slow Looking: Confronting Moving Images with Didi-Huberman

Materialities

  • Kim Knowles – (Re)visioning Celluloid: Aesthetics of Contact in Materialist Film
  • Emmanuelle André – Seeing through the Fingertips
  • Raymond Bellour – Homo Animalis Kino

Glitches

  • Sean Cubitt – Temporalities of the Glitch: Déjà Vu
  • Steven Shaviro – The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision
  • Allan Cameron – Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image

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