Chaoid Cinema: Deleuze & Guattari and the Topological Vector of Silence

About the Book

Expanding on a burgeoning area in contemporary film studies that explores visual and aural absences and interstices in film narrative, this book explores silences in the soundtrack not ambient silence or so-called 'room tone' but complete sound drop-outs, as if the film projector had broken down, thereby jolting the audience out of their passive relationship to the screen, forcing them to become aware of their surroundings and the material apparatus of film as a mechanical device.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of Chaoids, which are various organizations of chaos through the different disciplines of science, philosophy and art, this book uses silence to pursue a variety of vectors that open up the surface plane of art (in this case cinema) to discover different philosophical (and by extension, political) singularities and multiplicities.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: ‘Stratigraphic Silence’: Chaoid Cinema and Its Centripetal/Centrifugal Functions. 1: ‘The Multiplicity is Among Us’: Silence and the Machinic Phylum in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). 2: Ecosophical Chaoids: Towards an ‘Infinite Cinema’ with Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma (1970) and Gloria! (1979). 3: ‘There is no film. Let us proceed to the debates!’: Immanence as ‘Syncinema’ in Maurice Lemaître’s Le film est déjà commencé (1951) and Guy Debord’s Hurlements en Faveur de Sade (1952). 4: The Children of Barthes and Paris Match: Godard, Prostitution and the Rhetoric of the Image. 5: ‘Tricontinental Tropicalism’: The Convulsive Carnival of a Syncretic Populism in Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe (1967), Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças (1970) and I Idada da Terra (1980). 6: ‘See You at Mao’: the ‘60s Left Returns to Zero with the Dziga Vertov Group. 7: Silencing Interpellation: Gorin, Althusser and the Ideological State Apparatus. 8: ‘We’re Projectorists!’: Concrete Duration and the Spectacle of Attractions in Malcolm Le Grice’s Little Dog for Roger (1967); Threshold (1972); and After Lumière – L’Arroseur Arrosé (1974). 9: On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Formal Sense: Silence as Resistant Punctum in Abbas Kiarostami’s Chorus (1982), Homework (1989) and Close-Up (1990). Conclusion: ‘The Abyss Also Looks Into You’: From Syncinema to ‘Sin’ Cinema in Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009).

About the Author :
Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies in the departments of Art, Film and Media Studies, the History of Art and Architecture, and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Karel Reisz (Manchester University Press, 2007) and Joseph Losey (Manchester University Press, 2004).

Review :
Gardner’s pioneering work turns up the theoretical and philosophical volume on what is typically disregarded by critics and dismissed by directors in sound films: silence. Drawing on the ecosophical dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and building on an impressive range of examples from 1931 to 2009, Gardner performs a virtuosic recital of sonic dropouts, pregnant pauses, and zones of silence in cinema. This visionary book will serve as an ideal companion to emergent works of scholarship on visual absence and darkness in film studies and film-philosophy.