Many of the earliest film experiments were later assigned to the horror genre. Horror nails the viewer to his seat, first by the temptation to look and then the relief that it was all fiction. No genre is so inherently parasitic as in the way it physically adheres to the viewer and inevitably makes him break into cold sweat. Not to mention the many parasites that powers the horror genre, from vampires to aliens to zombies. In this program, we look at how experimental filmmakers operate the horror genre, disassembling it to tinker again as if a new Frankenstein.

This two-day event brings together academics, film-makers and artists for presentations, conversations, and screenings to explore the indefinite and the illegible in experimental film, artists’ film and video, and commercial cinema.

Light, motion, definition, compression: the conditions of recording, storing and screening moving image are subject to constant variations that pull them away from perfect visibility. Film-makers and artists often seek out and work with the resulting visual uncertainty, from the warping of space to the melding of senses; speed to slowness; darkness to glare; and blur to glitch. Indefinite Visions explores the possibility that an important function of moving image is not to show but to obscure, and that – like the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up – the closer and deeper we look at an image, the less clear it becomes.