Frédéric Brayard's Hyperchaos Cinema is a pioneering piece of film-philosophy that brilliantly counters our long-held reliance on Deleuze's time-image. By viewing contemporary cinema through the lens of Quentin Meillassoux's speculative materialism, Brayard provides a sharp theoretical breakthrough: post-cinematic images are no longer bound to continuous becoming or organic laws, but are instead governed by Hyperchaos, a realm of absolute contingency where time and physical laws can collapse, rewrite, or freeze without cause. Rather than viewing the camera as an extension of human consciousness, Brayard demonstrates how digital processes discorrelate the image from the viewer entirely. The result is a vibrant, provocative new ethics for post-cinematic spectatorship. Hyperchaos Cinema is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what happens to film when the world no longer resolves around us.

Anna Longo, Philosopher and LCSP research lab member, Université Paris Cité, France

This book answers the call of the Great Outdoors and finds it coming from within the image itself, beckoning us into a hyperchaotic cinematic world that Brayard navigates with philosophical aplomb and analytical prowess. Meillassoux's philosophy of absolute contingency allows the radicalisation of a history of film theory and philosophy, from Epstein, Deleuze and Sobchack, to contemporary theorists such as Shane Denson, revitalising our understanding of cinema and the world-without-us. Just as Meillassoux pushes beyond Deleuzian temporality in the heralding of a time without becoming, hyperchaos cinema presents worlds where it is no longer just time that is out of joint, but where the correlation between us and the world glitches. This does not noisily add to an increasingly hyper world of menacing chaos but opens the path to justice and joy.

Laurence Kent, Lecturer in Digital Film, University of Bristol, UK

Frédéric Brayard offers the first - overdue! - study of cinema in light of the speculative realist philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux. Hyperchaos Cinema invites us to consider how or whether we can think what there is when there is no thought. For, if there is no one left to consider, let alone to think the world, then what thought could there be? And yet, via analyses of work by French and French-adjacent directors like Quentin Dupieux, Pascale Ferran, Jean-Luc Godard and Gaspar Noé, Brayard suggests that cinema can offer up just such a Copernican (Meillassouxian?) revolution in (non-)thought. There may be no reason for anything to exist, but Brayard fiercely models how to think through such an unreasonable world, and to think no-matter-what.

William Brown, Associate Professor of Film, University of British Columbia, Canada