On this episode, we dial down the sharpness and celebrate cinematic blurriness.

Going against the common assumption that blur is only for backgrounds, a new book by Professor Martine Beugnet explores the power and poetics of the blurred image. Originally published in French in 2017, Blur (2026) is part of the Cutaways series from Fordham University Press, where authors take a close look at one particular cinematic theme or motif.

Martine has published widely on film theory and aesthetics since the early 2000s, with highly influential books such as  a monograph on director Claire Denis, Proust at the Movies, Cinema and Sensation: French Cinema and the Art of Transgression and dozens of articles, book chapters and edited collections. She is currently Professor in Visual Studies at Université Paris Cité but she spent more than a decade of the early part of her career teaching here at the University of Edinburgh.

Martine tells Pasquale about the process of having her work translated and the appeal of the short format volume. She talks about her choice of film examples which range from mainstream Hollywood cinema to experimental film, silent cinema to contemporary works. Discussion then turns to the many ways in which filmmakers employ blur, whether it’s to create ambiguity, to delineate a sense of character subjectivity or to shift back and forth in time.

Films mentioned in the discussion include Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), The Ipcress File (Sidney J. Furie, 1965), La captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000), Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) and In Water (Hong Sang Soo, 2023).