Hyperchaos Cinema

Hyperchaos Cinema develops a film-philosophy that resonates with the Speculative Turn and the Nonhuman Turn. Engaging with the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux, it argues that the absolute, the real independent from us, consists in what Meillassoux calls absolute contingency, or the possibility for everything to be what it is not. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the proliferating assemblages of human and digital images that shape our daily experience of reality have created a complex relationship between human thought, filmic thought and the world. Hyperchaos Cinema posits that digital cinema can think the real, understood as what exists without us, without neither thought nor subjectivity. Hyperchaos is the time through which absolute contingency expresses itself, which can change anything at any moment and for no reason. This book explores digital cinema’s ability to produce images that can express the being-other of any sound, image, movement, entity or process in a cinematic time that allows any possible change. The films explored, including Rubber, Holy Motors, Bird People, Réalité and The Image Book, shift their paradigm of time from the human-centred perspective of duration, process and becoming to hyperchaos. The analysis illuminates how film can produce images of diegetic worlds no longer regulated by stable, immutable rules. By considering how hyperchaos cinema eschews both anthropocentric and anthropomorphic positions, Hyperchaos Cinema offers an alternative to film-philosophies that develop human and post-human paradigms and suggests a film ethics for a world in which human subjectivity is neither central, nor necessary.