The Practice of “Non-knowing”: Experimental Cinema’s Blurred Aesthetics

In this chapter, I propose to build on a (non-exhaustive) typology of blurred effects favored in experimental film and videomaking, to explore the ways in which the resulting images foreground the materiality of the medium as well as the elusiveness of the recorded. I argue that, on the one hand, blur feeds into experimental cinema’s “technological imaginary”—an espousal of mediality as a form of “being-in-a-medium” (Agamben 1999), that encourages us to equate film with a form of thinking, dreaming, and feeling through images. In turn, blurred aesthetics can be said to exemplify the experience of film as one of thinking through “non-knowing,” as George Didi-Huberman describes it. Contrary to Brakhage in Metaphors on Vision (1963), Didi-Huberman does not call for an experience of art as a return to a pre-linguistic encounter with the visible, but, rather, advocates an approach based on the conscious decision to abandon knowledge as the first, and central dimension and objective of such an experience. The willingness to forego instant or full access to the art work’s content and meaning equally applies to our experience of experimental film, as a cinema that resists viewing as mere “visual consumption,” drawing us instead in the “paradoxical trial of (…), thinking through the dimension of non-knowing” (Didi-Huberman 1990).