Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine

Black Screens, White Frames offers a new understanding of blank screens in cinema. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's film-philosophy, author Tanya Shilina-Conte provides a detailed examination of non-images from early cinema to post-cinema. In other arts, absence has often been understood in terms of negative characteristics such as lacuna or lack, vacuum or void. Guided by a film-philosophical methodology and experimental modes of cinema rather than a thematic interpretation of its narrative forms, Shilina-Conte advances the concept of the filmmaking machine. She posits 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. Further, she argues that blank screens 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 is yet to appear and still to become. This reconsideration of non-images allows us to perform a more nuanced analysis 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 mode alters the way we study cinema and changes the questions we ask about its history.