TOO MUCH AND ALL WRONG
about the blurred image
For a break, for a change, I’m doing something different this week — a longer essay about blurring and blurred images. Yes, I still have Berlinale coverage to sift through — and then there’s Kinoteka. It’s all on the way. This is a pit-stop. The sun is shining.
“Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information”
— Gerhardt Richter
In February this year, a relatively high-profile Twitter user shared a video purporting to show a frenetic land-to-air joust between a Russian fighter jet and Ukrainian ground forces. While dizzying and ferocious, the video — to the observant eye — was also mildly uncanny: having a quality of too much precision. If you looked for too long, too closely, then the brain began to shuffle and squint. Quickly, a series of users pointed out that this was not video evidence of actual combat but — rather — footage ripped from the video game ARMA III.
Eventually, the original tweet — and video — was deleted. War — or an image of it — had slunk back into the shadows. Meanwhile, ‘actual’ footage of the conflict occupies a visually more complex place — being scattered, shaky, and softened by the work of ripping, encoding, and decompression. The ‘tell’ — properly — was the image’s excess of precision. Real life is never so unambiguous.
Writing recently in Spike, Daniel Moldoveanu observes that one of the calling cards of modernity is our frustrated collective quest “at making sense”, where we find ourselves caught between being “extremely self-aware” and yet “totally unable to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings”. If the world has drawn into ever denser corrugations of pixels and fidelity, then we — as figures who share, comment upon, rip, remix, and archive this footage – have also faded into its background (joining there — I imagine — a baffled Russian fighter-pilot and a Ukrainian infantryman). We’ve all been duped, occasionally.
Elsewhere, February —Berlin. South Korean filmmaker Hong-sang Soo — in a press conference promoting his latest film, In Water (2023) — remarked that he “was sick of the sharp image”. Fittingly, his latest work is shot in a very shallow field of focus — the camera sharpening only that which passes 5ft in front of its lens. For much of the film, the three principal characters go about their lives — in this case, the shooting of a low-budget, unscripted film — as blurry masses; features indistinguishable, gestures and ticks beyond legibility.
You could argue that this film — and its technique of blurring — comments neatly on the imprecisions and groping-toward-ness of filmmaking itself; particularly the slapdash methodology championed by directors such as Hong Sang-soo (who — I note with not a little irony — has spent more than 20 years shooting in a flat, even focus). You could argue that this ‘new’ not-focus concerns a more existential malaise (none of the conversation shared by the trio of characters rarely plumbs anything more than the superficial — grazing it: commentary on the food they order, on soju, the weather, Etc). They’re already out of focus.
With In Water, Hong Sang-soo’s plane of focus is an inflexible one, a technological fact — fixed in place. Never changing, it seems to ‘prevent’ the director from making all the tiny adjustments that they would typically make to translate the ‘real world’ into cinematic space (lighting, adjustments of focus). It is a rejection of its own subject — and (in a way) destroys itself (for he cannot really make this film again; he must return to the ‘sharp’ image, or something like it). Perhaps that’s why — in the press conference photo — he holds his hand to his head, despairing.
I wasn’t at this particular press conference — another kind of ‘blur’ — but discovered the quote a bit later on Twitter. Commenting beneath the captionless image, one user remarked that “the blurry, out of focus film is how I see the world every morning before i put my lenses in. as the director also has poor vision (his words) it’s so interesting that he’s made a film that records the action through his eye rather than the camera’s”. Here, then, is another typology of blur — the conflation of the camera’s (passive) lens and the director’s (authorial) eye. The equivalence with Bataille’s L’histoire de l’oeil (1928) is inescapable — as is Roland Barthes’ later essay on the metaphorical figurations of the eye: a thing that is interchangeable with eggs, bulls’ testicles and other ovular objects — as well as liquids (tears, cat’s milk, egg yolks, urination, blood, semen). The eye itself is a mediator only, and slips easily (spills, pours) into all manner of adjacent categories of ‘thing’. I think of Brodsky’s Watermark — of the tear that separates from the eye — and the eye that separates itself from the body — as it pursues the image of the floating city of Venice; slipping frequently into myopia, indeterminacy. The eye is already rheumy. It has already run away.
***
The out-of-focus image — the blurred image, the interrupted image — is not an empty space, though it contains qualities of emptiness. What it has is too much information — and in all the wrong places. Not a few writers have commented on the “natural obscenity” of the ‘rough’ image — with all its “filth and vulgarity” (here, I am borrowing the words of British playwright Peter Brook). The “theatre of noise” is — in his figuration — “anti-authoritarian, antitraditional [sic], anti-pomp, anti-pretence”. But noise is also a condition of excessive precision – a loss of focus stemming from our inability to filter, order, and process.
Too much is happening. We are subject to too much. It is what Bataille would refer to as the depense — the too much — in his The Accursed Share. But his most widely-discussed contribution would be “l’informe” (introduced in 1929): that which is not legible, non-didactic, but that still has a value proposition through its indeterminacy (avenues of dematerialization, abjection, and so on). This is transgressive, moving beyond the borders of the artwork’s ‘form’. For Bataille, this was a celebration of debasement — a thing that can bring us to a more exciting, engaged place. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois locate it in pieces such as Robert Smithson’s gravel works, like Gravel Mirrors with Cracks and Dust (1968), which — in its own way — harks back to Duchamp’s large glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), the work not properly being considered complete by Duchamp until its glass surface was smashed — accidentally — in transit. First, it needed to get fucked up.
The formless can point toward an excess: an excess of information, an excess of imagination — and an excess of productive/interpretive forces that cause it to burst beyond its borders; scattering everywhere. In Duchamp’s case, this was quite literal — pieces of glass and wire tumbling all over the place. Oops.
But the blur can also reflect back — particularly regarding the nature of modernity’s mass-produced image. For Gerhard Richter, the blur became an instrument of critique; at once obscurant and clarifying. Tom McCarthy comments on the German artist’s reiteration of a wryly misleading phrase: es ist wie’s ist, it is what it is. In painting toilet-roll holders, white tables, promotional pictures of new cars, holidaying families, he introduced a technique of blurring: “a corruption of an image, an assault upon its clarity, one that turns transparent lenses into opaque shower curtains, gauzy veils”. Richter does not paint [the] blur, but rather intervenes the blur — painting first with clarity, before using a squeegee to disrupt and ‘smear’ the image into a state of near-incomprehension. “I blur to make everything equal”, he observed, rendering “everything equally important and unimportant”. In capitalism — within flows of global capital — there is no longer a hierarchy of artistic subject matter, and there is no image worthier than any other: the destructing indeterminacy-machine of modern looking. This is a becoming-blur, the collapsing of a hierarchy. You might argue that it salvages these otherwise ordinary images into a space of thrilling indeterminacy — allowing the sublime to creep back in, while disrupting the original ‘intent’ of the source image (to capture a moment, to document a function [like the table], or to sell a car, Etc).
I’ve said it — I’ll go further; invoking Hito Steyerl’s poor image of 2009, which celebrates the visual detritus of the modern age, our most frequent and common boon companion:
“The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, and itinerary image distributed for free”
But this is not Richter’s blurred image — nor Hong-sang Soo’s “out of focus”. It is — properly — defined by its distribution, that it is always-already absent of focus. Richter re-mediates his images into a place of poverty; but, in doing so, resuscitates them — reintroduces an order of hierarchy and sublimity (the artist’s own, perhaps). Hong sang-soo chooses his blur. It wasn’t thrust upon him (quite the opposite — it entailed rejecting basically all the norms about how you actually make a film).
The other night, I sat with three friends in front of the wide-screen of a high-fidelity projector. Together, we roamed across YouTube using only generic video tags as our reference points: pairing ‘MOV’ with a string of four numbers. MOV 7228, MOV 5487, MOV 1366, opening up a distributed archive of videos that have been uploaded without title or context.
Typically, these videos are very short — from 2 seconds to 38, sometimes longer, often shorter. We glimpsed a snowy field near a collection of dark buildings, figures variously walking back and forth as they piled items onto a blazing fire. There was a group of tourists waving a camera around the viewing deck of a high tower. There was a field — bracken, brown reeds — around which two dogs were racing, barking, lolling. All of this was degraded, low-fidelity, and almost entirely out of focus, or barely on its cusp.
***
Formerly, the blur was the intimation of the oneiric — the dreamlike. As far back as 1928, Man Ray deployed the out-of-focus image to convey a sense of uncanny indeterminacy, with his L’etoile de mer. Many of its shots appear to be captured through a kind of diffused and textured glass, while intertitles lay claim to precisely-imprecise lyrical observations: “les dents des femmes sont des objets si charmants” (women’s teeth are such charming things). Ray’s technique for blurring was not dissimilar from Richter’s (interventionist) technique many years later — using a gelatine dry-plate process to achieve the effect (rather than blurring the original ‘pure’ image). The precise was degraded, dragged into imprecision. Reality’s sharpness — and precision —, even if it is itself under siege, is pulled into the obscure; and is swallowed by it.
But it’s not merely the lens that’s at fault — nor what we do with it. There is also a claim upon the authority of the eye (and the doubt that adheres to that eye). Michael Taussig, after many years of ethnographic fieldwork, published a collection of illustrations that he’d made in his notebooks — the work of long years and idle moments. The work’s title: I swear I saw this. Already, there is a desperation — an invocation of disbelief within the stronghold of a profession that, historically, has relied on its scientific distance from its subject matter — the reader’s belief that “I believe you saw this, I believe you understand it”. Through decades, that inviolability has also been laid under siege — between the battering rams of post-structuralism, reflexivity, institutional critique. The illustration is the nail in the coffin, the smashing of the glass.
What do these imprecise, illegible illustrations say about the ethnographic process? That the text — the ‘academic’ output, scientifically and intellectually impenetrable — came about through nothing more than an act of visual osmosis (I was there; I saw it happen; I documented it, Etc). The drawings don’t so much concretise his texts as dismantle them into the desiderata of stuff that happened — and stuff is happening every day. So why is this individual’s account — the anthropologist’s account — any more worthy than that of a store clerk, a reindeer herder, a passing tourist? Blurring is doubt, long before it is visually recognized as doubt (before Richter applies his squeegee to the canvas; before Man Ray paints thick globs of gelatine to the celluloid; before Hong-sang Soo adjusts the focus of his camera, pulling it toward him and away from the bodies of his acting subjects). We find ourselves, like Duchamp, staring fixedly at the smashed, prostrate frame of the large glass — not shrieking or trembling, but smiling — accepting, understanding. It was always supposed to be this way. Now the work is ‘complete’. Now it can be remanufactured (just as he would go on to produce at least two more [identical] versions of the large glass, capturing it in its condition of disarray). Naturally, a rapid glance over each artwork would suggest them as identical facsimiles. A closer look would reveal their tiny, nigh imperceptible differentiation; for the glass can never quite shatter the same way twice (or three times, or more).
Where does this leave us — squinting, rubbing our eyes? If the blurred image is a kind of lacking/excess — a thing with too much information, and in all the ‘wrong’ places — then it can serve more nefarious purposes. Lack of clarity can kill you — and it might certainly allow an unreliable actor to exploit the imprecision.
But it might also allow the filmmaker — or the artist — to say something ‘truthier’ about their subject. In his Poor Little Rich Girl, Warhol presented motionless shots of Edie Sedgwick “engaged in a series of everyday activities” (talking on the telephone, resting, modeling a new coat). The first 33 minutes of this film are out of focus, a structural constraint that — in the Whitney’s gloss — reflected Warhol’s interest, during the 1960s, in the accident, allowing the “inherent qualities” (or lack thereof) of the film stock to come to the fore. The reintroduction of focus came only after Warhol returned to the camera and changed the reel – having spent the previous 33 minutes elsewhere (physically absent). Like Hong-sang soo, Warhol ‘rejected’ or abrogated his control and authority over the camera. In its unfocused ‘error’, the camera brought Edie Sedgwick’s body — her subjecthood — to the fore. We ask ourselves not only: what is the actor doing, but ‘who are they’, ‘what are they’ — and what is film itself?
For filmmakers like Jonas Mekas, softness — and imprecision — were wielded through the process of embodied shooting and disarticulated editing. For Martine Beugnet, these works — such as As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001) — have “the distinguishing, fluttering quality of footage shot at low recording speed”, “subjected to variable exposures, superimpositions and sudden ruptures”. As a document of his life – friends, family, days out, breakfasts, landscapes — we are left with a radiating collage of constantly shifting visual information, a rapid eye-blinking that gives us much to ‘see’ and little time in which to properly frame it. We are always intuiting into, toward. What remains is an awareness of their graininess, their “blurred quality”, their imprecision. The camera becomes an instrument of ecstatic life — as indeterminate (and as visually hazy) as memory itself. The blur is the blur of life passing. We are left to assemble the pieces.
***
If there is doubt (I don’t know what I’m looking at), there’s also certainty (I know that there’s something here, ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’ the blur). It’s an image we glance at while attempting to look through it — an image that gets in the way of itself. We believe — we have to believe — that there is something else, an image within or through the image. For Richter, that’s certainly true — there was an image, and there is a reference: an image of which this image is a disrupted facsimile. For Hong-sang soo, the ‘other image’ is reality itself — three actors on a South Korean beach, sitting at a dinner table, chatting outside a house. But ‘real life’ isn’t cinema — and lays no claim on it. Hong-sang soo’s achievement — in this figuration — is to remind us of what cinema is not. Man Ray had perhaps other purposes. Not simply the dream, but a certain attitude toward the erotic — for the blurred image would allow him to escape accusations of perversity. Can you get worked up about an indecipherable implication? For Man Ray, to see the nudity that he has hidden/obscured is to acknowledge that you yourself can identify the erotic — despite it being gnarled and twisted. You become perverse. Recognizing that footage from the Ukrainian frontlines is really footage ripped from a video game might represent another admission of perversity: I simulate war — and for my own entertainment.
Does this make the blurred image always a perverse image? Perhaps. And, in losing one type of ‘focus’, does it help us to discover another focus — a deeper and more ambivalent image behind the one we immediately engage with? The blur helps the image to escape itself — to refer elsewhere. It also allows the artist to dismantle the privileged channel through which we are accustomed to ‘receiving’ a work. It makes the image impossible. It blows it up. It reveals itself to us. I swear I saw this — but what was it I actually saw?
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This was fascinating, thank you for sharing your thoughts!