Blur

Martine Beugnet (Author), Lindsay Turner (Translated by)

9781531511746

Hardback, published 13 February 2026

144 pages, 14 color illustrations
17.8 x 12.7 x 1.6 cm, 0.198 kg

"Beugnet’s ingenious insights seep like a fog into once-crisp categories of film analysis, unsettling notions of blur as visual deficiency. Near-sighted characters, formless smudges, teary and weary vision, and perspectival and atmospheric distortions energize this compelling love song to the affordances of and cinematic predisposition toward visual chaos, vagueness, uncertainty and confusion. Clearly, it’s the perfect moment for both cinema and blur." – Karen Redrobe, author of Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis

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.

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