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Black Screens, White Frames offers a new understanding of cinematic blankness. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and pursuing an affirmative approach to non-images through the concept of the filmmaking machine, Tanya Shilina-Conte shows how absence as a productive mode alters the ways in which we study film.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Fade-In: Introduction. The Filmmaking Machine, or Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Black or White Screen
- Chapter 1. Divergent Darkness: The Black Screen in Early Cinema
- Chapter 2. Convergent Codes: Fade-ins and Fade-outs as Rational Transitions in Classical Cinema
- Chapter 3. The Black or White Screen as a Tool of Deterritorialization in Modern and Experimental Cinema
- Chapter 4. One Chapter Less: The Black or White Screen in Minor Cinema
- Chapter 5. Folds to Black or White in Minor Cinema and Art Practice
- Chapter 6. Alternate Endings: The Black or White Screen in Post-Cinema
- Fade-Out: Conclusion. This Video Does Not Exist: The Remix of Black or White Screens and Multimodal Scholarship
- Notes
- Index
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
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 that 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.
