Blur

In cinema, blurriness is usually intended to go unnoticed. When it appears it is either considered an error — a mistake of focus or a technological failure — or a background effect of shallow focus intended to offset a defined image. As Martine Beugnet argues, however, blur is an essential feature of the cinema, possessing its own properties and affordances, and capable of powerful effects.
Examining an array of notable examples of blurriness from horror to art cinema and experimental film, and including the works of the Lumière brothers, Josef von Sternberg, Agnès Varda and many others, she develops a taxonomy of blurs, from speed and motion blur to the hand-held, "shaky camera" blur common in contemporary digital cinema. These wide-ranging instances all return the viewer to the sensorial and material qualities of the moving image.
In the face of technological developments that valorize sharpness as an indicator of progress, blur stands as a provocative reminder of the value of uncertainty—a sign of the irreducible mystery at the heart of the filmic image.

Martine Beugnet (Author) Martine Beugnet is Professor in Visual Studies at the Université Paris Cité and a member of ECHELLES, a CNRS research institute. In English, she is the author of Cinema and Sensation (2007, 2012) and Claire Denis (2004), coauthor of Proust at the Movies (2005), and coeditor of Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (2017). Lindsay Turner (Translator) Lindsay Turner is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of two collections of poetry and has translated books by Stéphane Bouquet, Éric Baratay, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Richard Rechtman, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others.

Prologue (Myopia) 1 In Praise of Indistinction 7 Blur’s Paradox: Images That Kill, 18 • High-Definition Blur, 20 Definition 24 Aesthetics of Blur 26 Rain, Mist, Fog 29 Focus 34 Alfred Hitchcock: Blur, or the Staging of Desire, 36 • Alain Cavalier: Seeing Closer, 41 • Seeing [and] Touching, 43 • The Tactile Eye, 46 Motion Blur 49 Speeds, 50 • Slow Motion [Jean-Luc Godard], 55 • Shakiness [Sally Potter], 60 • Interlacings [Leighton Pierce], 64 Reveries of the Image 68 Photogénie of Melancholy 75 The Painterly and the Formless 82 Pictorialism [Josef von Sternberg], 82 • The Appeal of Abstraction [Michelangelo Antonioni], 89 • Toward Formlessness, 92 • Limbo [Gus Van Sant], 94 • Photogénie of Memory, 99 Technology Has No Rules 103 Notes 107 Figures 119