Chaoid Cinema

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. Colin Gardner is professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches in the departments of Art, Film & Media Studies, the History of Art and Architecture and the Comparative Literature programme