Folds to Black or White in Minor Cinema and Art Practice

Chapter 5 elucidates the theory of “folds to black or white” in minor cinema. The concept of folds to black or white expands on both fade-ins and fade-outs as rational transitions and black or white screens as irrational cuts (or interstices) in cinema. Folds to black or white counter impossibilities and impediments in the social sphere, inviting alternative readings of history and memory. The chapter fuses Laura U. Marks’s enfolding-unfolding model of “Experience—Information—Image,” with Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the abstract machine of faciality, or the “white wall” and “black hole” system. The machine of faciality not only dictates the politics of the face but is also deeply embedded within the signifying forms of social life, which makes minoritarian artists attuned to its mechanisms of operation. Minoritarian artists think (or fold) outside of majoritarian history and psychological memory, in absolute memory and pure time. Folds to black or white in minor cinema manifest as blackouts or whiteouts in various degrees of dissolving, blurring, or thinning out. These strategies deterritorialize the figurative in cinema by effacing visuals, proceeding not by negative erasure but by the folding and unfolding of matter. Drawing upon Marks’s three planes of “Experience—Information—Image,” the chapter further argues that folds to black or white in minor artworks entail the enfolding of suppressed or dismissed minor memory and material experience and the enfolding of censored or erased minor history, information, and images, as well as their selective unfoldings by the dominant powers and mainstream media.

Art · Art history · Humanities · Minor (academic) · Movie theater · Visual arts · White (mutation) · Chemistry · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · South Asian Cinema and Culture