Laurence Kent (University of Bristol)

ABSTRACT

This talk explores two disparate examples of blurred images as working through the afterlives of slavery: Hussein Shariffe’s The Dislocation of Amber (1975) and Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016). Shariffe’s experimental film utilises a painterly blurring of the image in its depiction of the ghosts of colonialism haunting the ruined Sudanese port city of Suakin. Jafa’s found-footage work incorporates the visually poor and pixellated in its traversing of the online archive of Black American culture, (re)mixing violence, death, and joy across the images it deploys. Both reckon with colonial afterlives as constituting spectral presences, with blurriness indexing an in-between of life and death. This is what Shariffe has called “an alternative to dying,” working with Sufi poetry channelling the resurrection of spirits, and Jafa has articulated as “my black death” after Orlando Patterson’s notion of “social death.” To understand the role of the blurry image in these experimental works, I will undertake a genealogy of the blur. This is a project already begun in Martine Beugnet’s recently translated book, Blur (2026), where “the existence of the blur at the heart of the cinematic image preserves the presence of the unknown within it,” and is developed here in cases when this unknown becomes a “death-image.” It is through this genealogy that the temporality of the different kinds of deaths in these films can be reckoned with. Shariffe’s colonial spectres harbour a strange form of life in death and ruination, and Jafa’s exhibition of poor images index social death in life beset by white supremacy. Living a(n) (after)life out of focus is a ruinous form of control and subjection, but cinematic forms of blurring can introduce provocative aesthetic forces of contingency and alterity that work towards a film-philosophical meditation on alternative forms of death. These are, in Susana Viegas’ words, “the cryptic image(s) of death” that the blur can provide.

BIO

Laurence Kent is Lecturer in Digital Film & Television at the University of Bristol. He has published and presented on various topics within film theory and philosophy, from Deleuzian ethics, experimental cinema, Hollywood action film, archiving practices, and anticolonial aesthetics. His articles and book reviews have appeared in Film-Philosophy, Alphaville, Studies in World Cinema, Screen, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Frames Cinema Journal, and Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, amongst others. He is engaged in archival projects relating to Sudanese cinema and his current research explores forms of contingency, noise, and blurring within screen media.

This will be a hybrid seminar and will be held on July 29 16:00 WEST in room A206 of NOVA FCSH (Berna Campus) and on Microsoft Teams. You can register here.