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A scene from The Sacrifice
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In a world full of sound and fury, silence signifies a lot. It can be deafening and fearsome. The crackling sound of fire had never felt so ominous before I watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. The scene in which the protagonist, Alexander, sets fire to his house is completely, and dreadfully, silent — except for the sound of the fire slowly engulfing his worldly possessions. Such silence compels one to listen. It makes one search frantically for sound and cling to it.
Silence has been used in cinema to lead the audience to a range of experiences — be it the sense of fatefulness in Tarkovsky’s films, the tussle between inevitability and desire in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Trilogy of Silence, the overpowering passion and melancholy of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue, the stoic irony of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Silence, the surreal aura of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, or the subaltern resistance in Kim Ki-duk’s The Isle and 3-Iron.
Recalling Harold Pinter’s theory of “two silences”, one feels that silence in cinema is often not the absence of sound but the potent, eloquent anticipation of sound. This eloquence is palpable in Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, a 2007 thriller which relies almost entirely on silence to amplify and dramatize the very few sounds it contains.
But my relationship with cinematic silence is that of the post-silent film era. My perception of silence in a film sequence, therefore, discounts the reality of cinema being entirely devoid of sound — or, to be more specific, synchronized sound. Before the first ‘talking film’, The Jazz Singer, was released in 1927, cinema was far less noisy. Silence, in that time, would not be an anticipatory pause, an unpredicted void or an intervening Other, but the underlying truth of the medium.
Silent films, however, were not completely silent. They had title cards instead of spoken dialogue, but they almost always had live music. They had either an accompanying orchestra or organists and solo pianists. Sometimes they also had ‘special effects’ — bass drums and cymbals creating the sounds of galloping horses and rolling thunder. Japanese films even had a live narrator — a benshi — providing commentary and character voices. (The intervention of external sound in a silent film, interestingly, combined the theatrical with the cinematic.)
To the modern audience, a silent film may seem to be a struggle for sound. In these films, the lack of sound did not carry connotations; it was simply an impediment. This silence epitomized the urge to communicate without sound. The heightened expressions and body language of the actors, the tinted hues used in different scenes to convey moods and the live music were all signs of this struggle. It was a muted world searching for a tongue — for the language of sounds.
The years following the release of the first talking film were those which energetically explored this newfound language in cinema. Sounds not only removed the impediment of muteness but brought forth the possibility of a new kind of acting and cinematography. As Kurosawa once said, “Cinematic sound is never merely accompaniment, never merely what the sound machine caught while you took the scene. Real sound does not merely add to the images, it multiplies it.” Over the years, experiments with sound have invariably led to experiments with the lack of it. Today, the aesthetic of silence has been rediscovered in cinema, as a language. But the struggle to communicate — which led filmmakers to first carve sound out of silence and then silence out of sound — still thrives.
Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, the 2011 silent film that won five Oscars this year, may have been counting on nostalgia. Or maybe it was experimenting with the modern audience’s reaction to a silent film. Did The Artist need to impose on itself the obstacle of silence to excel as a film? It may startle an audience that is used to cinematic silence not as muteness but as discourse. To such an audience the apparent struggle for sound may stand out. But this longing to reach out through silence — or through sound — is not simply a curious occurrence; it is the essence of cinema. Would The Birth of a Nation have been a better film with sound?
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