Chaoid Cinema

Film studies has recently turned its attention to what is left out of movies, the gaps in both image and sound. This book follows that trend by examining the soundtrack's silences. It sets aside the faint background hush that editors call room tone and looks instead at total sound drop-outs, the kind that might suggest a projector had failed mid-screening. Such moments can startle viewers out of their usual absorption and make them notice the room around them and the cinema as a physical, mechanical machine.

The author builds on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's idea of the Chaoid, a way of ordering chaos that appears across science, philosophy and the arts. Using silence as the central tool, the book follows several lines of inquiry that open up cinema as a field of art, revealing philosophical and, by extension, political singularities and multiplicities.