Indefinite Visions

Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality Series edited by Martine Beugnet and Kriss Ravetto Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty Edited by Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit 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. Martine Beugnet is Professor in Visual Studies at the University of Paris 7 Diderot Allan Cameron is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Auckland Arild Fetveit is Associate Professor in the Department for Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen