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

A Deleuzian analysis of the role of silence as chaotic interstice in sound film.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 376 pages
Publication date: 31 August 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

A Deleuzian analysis of the role of silence as a chaotic interstice in sound film applies Deleuze and Guattari's concept of Chaoids to cinema for the first time. Utilizing case studies from world cinemas such as Iran, Brazil, France, the UK, the U.S.A., and Germany, the book explores different philosophical, cultural, and historical contexts. It brings together film-philosophy, comparative literature (lettrism, Iranian poetry, Joyce, and Ponge), film history, and radical movements from the 1960s and 70s. 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.

Weight: 576g
Dimension: 234 x 155 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474494038