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

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.