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Black Screens, White Frames
Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine
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Book Presentation:
Black Screens, White Frames offers a new understanding of cinematic blankness. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's philosophy, Tanya Shilina-Conte provides a detailed examination of non-images throughout film history. In different arts, including cinema, absence has often been understood in a negative way― as a lack or lacuna, a vacuum or void. To remedy this, Shilina-Conte advances the concept of the filmmaking machine as an abstract art machine in constant production, which shifts our understanding of absence in cinema from negative to generative theorization. In the course of machinic production, dissociation ceases to be a negative characteristic of failure or incapacity and becomes a creative and capacious gesture of artistic experimentation. Shilina-Conte's approach is guided by a film-philosophical methodology and experimental modes of cinema rather than a thematic interpretation of its narrative forms. Further, she argues that blank screens (and their derivatives) function as points of deterritorialization within the filmmaking machine. In each chapter, she demonstrates that black or white screens either instigate relative deterritorializations or engender absolute escapes from narrative regimes in cinema. Blank screens in cinema, as machinic mutations and conditions of possibility, do not represent or symbolize but instead activate what has yet to appear and is still to become. This innovative reconsideration of non-images allows us to perform more nuanced analyses of cinematic modes often overlooked in traditional film criticism. The wide-ranging discussion of canonical and rare examples in Shilina-Conte's book uncovers how absence as a productive process not only alters the ways in which we study cinema but also changes the questions we ask about its history.
About the Author:
Tanya Shilina-Conte is Assistant Professor of Global Film Studies in the Department of English, University at Buffalo. Her essays have appeared in Screen, Film-Philosophy, Frames Cinema Journal, Word & Image, Studia Phænomenologica, In Media Res, Iran Namag, Leitura: Teoria & Prática, Studia Linguistica, Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film, and elsewhere.
Press Reviews:
"An important expansion of Deleuzian cinematic philosophy, Black Screens, White Frames reconceptualizes the "blank" screen as a populated and performative machine. With limpid, compelling writing, Shilina-Conte guides the reader confidently through a generative assemblage of concepts, illuminates their contexts, and tests them on an exciting variety of movies, from early cinema to supercut, that release enfolded powers." -- Laura U. Marks, Simon Fraser University
"In Black Screens, White Frames, Tanya Shilina-Conte demonstrates the generative power and infinite possibilities for new thought, unknown sensations, and untold stories one can find at the limits of perception when there is nothing more (or nothing yet) to see. Extensively researched, intelligently written, and conceptually strong, this book sheds new light on both film history and more contemporary post-cinema's digital modulations. By exploring the ways in which the virtual and the unseen can be considered as an integral part of the 'filmmaking machine,' this is an excellent and recommendable contribution to film-philosophy." -- Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam
"Black Screens, White Frames brilliantly expands on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari to show how the use of black screens and white frames can vacillate between an expression of conservative narratology and radical deterritorializations, from early cinema to post-war experimental and non-western minoritarian cinema. This book is not only an exemplary work of film-philosophy but also the perfect reader's guide to the practical application of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy as a whole. Perhaps the greatest accolade one could give Professor Shilina-Conte is that she is not only an accomplished scholarly and film auteur but also the ultimate catalyst for our own creative involvement in the films themselves." -- Colin Gardner, UC Santa Barbara
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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