Black Box is the regular experimental strand at Edinburgh International Film Festival, curated by Kim Knowles. It comprises four shorts programmes dealing with the body and technology, journeys and discoveries, ritual and transformation, and matters of the environment, and two feature films. In the context of the Festival’s 70th anniversary, Black Box revisits the 1970s with two retrospective screenings and a special event celebrating one of the most important periods in the history of the Festival.

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.