Absence in Cinema – The Art of Showing Nothing

Is there an invisible or hidden art form? To answer this question, Absence in Cinema offers a new understanding of a selection of films that might puzzle cinephiles with their unconventional nature and method of creation.
In these works, the absence of familiar cinematic elements — such as sound, dialogue, or even image — plays a central role in how the film presents itself. From this standpoint, significant attention has been devoted to gestures of absence within cinema.

Author Justin Remes explores modes of disappearance — if one may call them that — even though studying cinema might seem a paradoxical endeavor in itself. His study seeks to raise some of the most artistically unsettling questions of the past century about what is repressed or unseen.

The book examines how experimental films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have employed absence in essential ways, treating it as a core aesthetic and formal element of cinematic expression. Through works devoid of sound, dialogue, or words, Remes investigates how aesthetic emptiness can become a way of thinking about cinema — through the films and chapters he discusses — in hopes of inspiring further research into the significance of absence in cinema and its impact on audience reception.