Indefinite Visions
Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty
Publication | Table des matières | Critiques
Résumé
Examines the aesthetics, concepts and politics of chaotic and obscured moving images
Audiovisual culture often privileges the instantly identifiable: the recognizable face, the well-timed stunt, the perfectly synchronized line of dialogue. Yet order and clarity do not come ‘naturally’ to the moving image. Light, motion, definition, compression: the conditions of recording, storing and screening can subject audiovisual media to countless variations, pulling them towards the indefinite and illegible. Filmmakers and artists often seek out and work with the resulting uncertainty, from the warping of space to the melding of senses, from glare to shadow and blur to glitch.
This collection concerns itself with the aesthetics, concepts and politics of indefinite and obscured moving images, examining what is at stake in their foregrounding of materiality and mediation, evanescence and flux. Pursuing a range of approaches (spanning history, theory and close analysis), the authors in this volume investigate techniques, effects and themes that emerge from the wilful excavation of the moving image’s formal and material base.
Contributors
- Emmanuelle André, Université Paris 7 Diderot
- Jacques Aumont, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
- Erika Balsom, King’s College London
- Raymond Bellour, French National Center for Scientific Research
- Martine Beugnet, Université Paris 7 Diderot
- Christa Blümlinger, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
- Allan Cameron, University of Auckland
- Michel Chion, Composer, Filmmaker and Essay Writer
- Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London
- Catherine Fowler, University of Otago
- Tom Gunning, University of Chicago
- Julian Hanich, University of Groningen
- Martin Jay, University of California, Berkley
- Kim Knowles, Aberystwyth University
- Richard Misek, University of Kent
- Giusy Pisano, Ecole Nationale Supérieure Louis Lumière
- Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, University of California, Davis
- D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago
- Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University
- Carol Vernallis, Stanford University
Table des matières
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
Critiques
- “This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
– Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK - “The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
– Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course