Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine, by Tanya Shilina-Conte

Gilles Deleuze’s effect on film theory has been immense, and seems only to be growing. D. N. Rodowick’s Deleuze’s Time Machine, Anna Powell’s Deleuze and Horror, Barry Nevin’s Cracking Gilles Deleuze’s Crystal, along with a number of essay collections such as The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, and Rodowick’s Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy document this lively direction in the intellectual response to motion pictures. To this burgeoning subdiscipline can be added Tanya Shilina-Conte’s Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine. Using the motif of the monotone screen to review the entire history of cinema, Shilina-Conte’s treatise is simultaneously a new interpretation of cinema, a commentary on Deleuze’s film theory and philosophy, more broadly, and an aesthetic work in its own right. A topic that might at first appear narrow and recondite proves to be a window on generative absence as such.