Please join us as we return to in-person talks in the cinema space at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center!

The goal of Tanya’s multimodal project, which consists of a scholarly book, Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Interstices of Cinema, and a remixed essay film, This Video Does Not Exist, is to reevaluate film historical objects by bringing attention to the interstices, the irruption of non-images, in many different types of cinema. Both the book and film advance a transversal, productive, and affirmative understanding of visual absence in cinema. Tanya’s talk will disclose how the consideration of absence alters the way we study cinema and changes the questions that we ask about its history, highlighting what would otherwise have fallen between the cracks or been hidden in the gaps. Examples include previously unaddressed and understudied films in early, classical, avant-garde, and non-Western cinema, as well as post-media hybrid works, as one would expect in a film historical study. This talk will introduce the audience to Tanya’s theoretical coinages, such as the filmmaking machine, interstitial method, elective mutism, folds to black and white, and folded feminisms, whose purpose is to overcome traditional methods of hermeneutical film analysis through recourse to the film-philosophical apparatus.

This event will be simultaneously live-streamed. Click here to watch the live-stream via the Hallwalls website. The talk will begin at ~4:15pm.

About Tanya Shilina-Conte, Assistant Professor of Global Film Studies, Department of English

Tanya’s academic interests include global cinema, transnational, diasporic, and exilic film cultures, film-philosophy, Deleuze Studies, remix studies, and theories of affect and non-representation. Her current research focuses on the philosophical, socio-political, and historical significance of cinematic absence, both as an introduction to the overlooked or suppressed phenomena during different periods of film history and as exposure to alternative means of representation in film and media arts. Her research has been published in Screen, Film-Philosophy, Frames Cinema Journal, Word & Image, Studia Phænomenologica, Iran Namag, Leitura: Teoria & Pratica, Studia Linguistica, Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film, and elsewhere. She is now completing her book manuscript, Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Interstices of Cinema, which explores the phenomenon of visual absence from early to post-cinema through the lens of film-philosophy (under contract with Oxford University Press). She has also begun work on a new book project, tentatively entitled Anonymous Cinema in the Global Age.