This essay is a phenomenological taxonomy of silence.  It examines the variety of manifestations of silence in film and outlines a hierarchical structure of the occurrences, references and symbols of silence in cinema.  It by no means claims to be a comprehensive account, but rather a model within which to place the myriad of occurrences.

First, the inherent contradiction in the discussion of film silence must be acknowledge, for it can be said that ‘there is no such thing as silence.’ The very notion of pure silence is itself problematic.  This argument that there can be no pure silence is based on the notion that silence cannot be described except in relation to sound, yet where there is sound there is not silence.  Professor Pedro Cuperman of Syracuse University used the analogy, “one can not understand darkness by illuminating it with a candle.”   The very act of listening for silence pushes it from our grasp. 

To complicate the pursuit of silence even further, it can be said that the moving image evokes an internal sound on the part of the viewer.   Therefore, even the presentation of a film with no physical sound track can be said to evoke an internal, psychological sound.  The asynchronous rattle of the heating system in the auditorium where Stan Brakhage’s images flash by becomes the drumbeat to his “silent film.”  We either impose upon the images sounds from the environment, or the images summon internal, psychological sound associations.  Either way, the notion of the film as truly silent is in question.

It has been suggested that this is a taxonomy of quiet rather than silence.  While darkness and quiet can be measure in degrees, silence is an absolute.  But while quiet may in fact be more accurate after an analysis of the physical sound track is done, it is the original perception of the scene as silent which is of concern. For those who look for the silence in films (as one who illuminates the darkness with a candle), the silence seems to vanish before them.  But the experience of a viewer, references to silence, characters who do not speak, instruments that can not be heard, these are all part of the language of silence within cinema.

While the viewer will sometimes experience a moment in a film as silent, the filmmaker knows that, at the least, there is “room tone” (or what I call recorded silence).  Also, sometimes moments that in retrospect clearly have sound, (music or ambient sounds) are experienced as silent.  Perhaps quiet can be distinguished from silence simply by asking what is the intended focus of attention.  For example, if the main action is dialogue between two characters in a restaurant, (now I am thinking of My Dinner With Andre) and the sounds around them are so subtle that they go unnoticed, then that environment is silent.  If they were, for example, to talk softly, being that our attention is on the conversation, then the conversation is quiet.  Because the sounds around the two characters do not "speak" or carry meaning important to the narrative, I consider them silent. If a moment is perceived as silent an then on further examination of the scene it is discovered that there is hiss, static or even music does this full invalidate the first experience? A great example of the shift from silence to quiet occurs in My Dinner With Andre when the two characters stop talking, and the film cuts to a shot, which reveals the now empty restaurant.  One of the waiters shakes out a tablecloth.  This sound now marks all that we have not heard or noticed.  The sounds in the restaurant have died away, the people have left, the waiters are resetting the tables, and all has become quiet.  We now notice the few soft, intermittent, sounds that belong to the space.  We notice the sounds that have stopped, the people who have left, the music that is no longer present.  We notice the silence.

Despite the problematic notion of true silence, we nevertheless can define and identify many ways silence is perceived and represented in film.  The structure of the taxonomy is explained below, categorizing the different expressions of silence and how they interrelate.

Primary Categories

The twelve categories below can be divided into two groups of three subcategories each.  The first group consists of the three kinds of silence. The second group contains the three primary ways silence is evoked or created. The first type of silence is the silent image which continues to evoke mental sounds.  This is considered “mute” silence.  The second is the removal or denial of sound (either all sounds or specific sounds).  When film calls attention to the removal or denial of sound it creates new possibilities for meaning.  This is what I’ve called “silencing.”  The last of the three subcategories in this group is “signified silence.”  This includes any reference to silence.  As I’ve discussed above silence cannot fully exist and therefore must be signified in some way.  For example, a distant sound can call attention to the lack of sound in the nearby area or the use of old silent film footage within a sound film references silence as an historical period of filmmaking.  These are both examples of “signified” silence.

The subcategory of Silencing can either be used simply as a thematic device or it may call attention to the meaning of silence itself.  If it does the latter it belongs simultaneously to two categories: Signified Silence and Silencing.  Furthermore Silencing always produces the effect of moving to the category of Mute Silence.  When a sound is overwhelmed or eliminated, the visual element to which it belonged continues to “speak” visually and thus belongs to the category Mute Silence.

The second group of subcategories explains the three primary ways in which the above twelve types of silence are created.  The affect of silence in the cinema is created in one or more of three ways: a shift in sound, a shift in the visual images, or by what Percheron has called Off Sound.  Off Sound is a sound that belongs to the natural world of the film but does not belong to the image on the screen.  For example the voice of someone standing just outside the picture frame is considered Off Sound.  The primary example of Off Sound and relation to silence occurs in the category of Distant Sound described above.

Reference to the Gaze

 Silence as gaze comes from the ancient tradition of gesticular storytelling.  The first films were stories of the gaze, stories without voice.  Clearly aware of this Ozu plays with this aspect of silence in his film, Late Spring.  In one scene, Ozu shows a play wherein a masked figure tells a story through ritual gestures.  Ozu then cuts to a woman in the audience who conveys meaning through a series of long glances from her father to the woman he loves.  The continuous drums, which belong to the play, overlap this long scene bringing together the masked story on stage with the silent glances of the woman.

This scene, layered with meaning, touches on the very essence and root of the cinema.  It recalls the first recordings of movement and gesture, the first gaze to capture time. We see a formal play within a real play, two silent gestures referencing silent cinema. Ozu has taken this and twisted it by allowing us to watch the representation of someone watching a play, but then making the real play the gestures of the woman watching. But this traditional dance, the play, and the drums take us even further back to an age before speech, when we told our stories in large gestures and scratched our marks in the sand.

While the photograph is silent because it suggests a moment frozen in time, the moving image depicts physical events which generate sound. While it has been pointed out that sounds always reference an image (because sounds are always created by something physical) it has been argued that images do not necessarily evoke sound.   As Rick Altman has pointed out, sounds ask a question and automatically evoke an image of the sounds source.  But, to some lesser degree the same can be said of the image. The image evokes a mental concept of the sound, which would naturally accompany the image, whether that sound is present or not.  Because the image evokes sounds internally, the “silent” film can be considered mute, not silent.   Sound film, however, can signify silence in many different ways (the subject of this taxonomy).  One of the signifiers of silence, within the sound film, is the silent film.  Or, as in the case mentioned above, the tradition of silent Asian theater.  Just as the silent film had music and the traditional theater had drums, silence in this case is the language of the visual gaze, and not the spoken voice.   

Alterations of Time

As I have discussed above, the moving image naturally evokes sound.  This is, however, depended on the realistic portrayal of time because of times relation to natural physical laws we experience every day.  We do not see the world in still images, fast or slow motion, therefore it is quite common that films will often treat the sound of such images quite differently or leave them silent.

Distant Sound

Bella Balazs, in his discussion of silence refers to the relationship between silence and space.   "…. If the morning breeze blows the sound of a cock crowing over to us from the neighboring village, if from the top of a high mountain we hear the tapping of a woodcutters' axe far below in the valley, if we hear the crack of the whip a mile away- then we are hearing the silence around us.  We feel the silence when we can hear the most distant sound or the slightest rustle near us." In another of Ozu's films the distant sounds of the factory accentuate the silence of the space where a woman weeps upon the floor.  Perhaps this can be considered a metalinguistic reference. 

 Limited Palette

"Sound differentiates visible things, silence brings them closer to each other and makes them less dissimilar.  Every painting shows this happy harmony, the hidden common language of mute things conversing with each other, recognizing each other's shapes, and entering into relations with each other in a composition common to them all.  This was a great advantage that the silent film had over the sound film" (Weis and Belton, 118). The idea that Balazs is conveying here is what I call limiting your palette.  By simplifying the elements of a work, or a piece of work, the artist can create a sense of unity.  If we take away the sounds belonging to the physical occurrences in a scene in a film, leave it silent or add music, we have silenced the naturalistic style, simplified and unified the scene.  This is the idea of removing layers of expression to find the essential meaning.

Transition, or The Beat

This simple use of silence forms a transition from one scene to another, usually at the end of a climatic moment and movement to a completely different space.  The sounds at the end of the scene fade out in the establishing shot of the next scene, then silence until either the moment of the next shot (with the beginning of the action) or just before the second shot of the new scene.  There are variations of this where several shots will occur without sound sometimes during transitional images before the next scene begins (Mei-Fang showed an example of this in class in the Asian film where the women disappears in her boat on the river).

Visual Demarcation of Silence and Enhanced Silence

There is a subtle difference between these two, the first draws attention to the silence, which we are not necessarily aware of, and the other enhances the silence of which we are already conscious.  Visual Demarcation of Silence is the example I give in the beginning when I discuss My Dinner with Andre wherein the sound of the tablecloth marks the silence of the space.  Enhanced Silence is found in another of Ozu’s films, Floating Weeds (rough translation from Chinese) in which we see a fight which ends in silence.  In the room where the man now sits alone, small flower petals fall from the ceiling visually accentuating the silence of the space.  The petals are visually saying, "You can't hear this." 

Contradictory Silence

This is similar to demarcated silence because of the sound/image relationship.  Contradictory silence occurs when we see something that naturally makes sound (for example a piano being played) but we cannot hear it; we are denied the sound.

Silence as Contrast

Silence occurs in relation to sound.  There are loud silences and quiet silences.  There is never true silence.  Perception requires two simultaneous existences, which is to say an opposite is never present in its ideal form.  As I said above film silence should be understood in relation to perceptual awareness. There are probably only a few special films that cut out all the sound, leaving a complete brake in the physical sound track.  Room tone and recorded "silence" (the sound that will not be consciously noticed) fill the moments when the filmmaker actually wants the viewer to experience "no sound."  Therefore silence in film is never pure, but exists in many forms always in relation to sound.  Tarkovsky plays with this in all his films. In Andrei Rubelov he cuts from a battle scene, which is filled with ringing bells, screams and the sounds of the chaos of slaughter to a shot of a boy escaping in the woods.  This shot seems silent. Accented by this perceived silence are the boy's gasps for air, which Tarkovsky has made louder than the boy’s distance (size in the frame) would imply.  He then cuts to a shot of an archer and once again the silence is accented by the exaggerated sound of the bow as it releases.  This is the power of contrast.  Many films use this technique.  One most only think of the numerous chase scenes where men with guns stealthily chase one another through empty warehouses…the gun shots ring out, then silence…then the soft moans of someone wounded… Tarkovsky however allows the silence to work in a much larger way.  Tarkovsky creates a field of silence.

Expectation and the Field of Silence

Again take the scene from Andrei Rubelov, which I have described above.  Silence, in this scene, servers as a field for the sound, a large white table upon which one colorful item after another is placed and then removed.  The "field of silence" is probably one of the most powerful tolls for activating the imagination of the viewer.  For me a clear line divides the films, which, like theater, require the suspension of disbelief achieved through styles of narrative realism, and the films, which, like literature, require the imagination to build the reality of the story.  The problem is audiences aren't used to having space for their imaginative abilities and don't expect such spaces from the cinema.  Because of this filmgoers who aren't used to anything but the convention of Hollywood, experience such variations as "artistic," or when subtly done, as disengaging.  The Hollywood structure uses music to cover space and reiterate the visual statement, enforcing the inert state of today's moviegoers.

The magic of the Field of Silence lies in its power to build expectation, to build in the viewer a yearning, a 'reaching out.'  Expectation is the key element. The denial of an expected sound is the great power of silence in film.  The field of silence can hold within it many unheard sounds.  Indeed Tarkovsky's films are infinitely rich with layers of sound, which are ever moving in and out of our hearing.  The Field of Silence is Visual Demarcation used again and again. It is the shifting from noticed sound to unnoticed sound to noticed silence.

Migrating Silence

Again let me use the Tarkovsky example from Andrei Rubelov.  In the first shot after the battle we see the boy running away (the silence is marked by his breathing).  In the next shot the only sound occurs with the release of the arrow from the bow.  In the following shot we hear the gasp, then nothing.  At this point the silence is no longer that of a physical space that makes no noise, but of the internal, psychological state of the boy who has been shot.  We realize this as he splashes in the water and we hear only the delayed and accented sound of water.  As he falls into the water we hear nothing because he hears nothing.  After a little bit the sounds of the water fade back in and the sounds (and silences) now belong again to the external, natural world.  This is migrating silence.  Perhaps psychological silence should be given its own category, but for now let us leave it at that.

Silencing

Perhaps there is one aspect distinct from "silence" but that should be included in the taxonomy.  This is the process of silencing.  It is important to distinguish between moments of silence and moments of silencing.  Silencing is simply the process of sound replacing what would otherwise have been heard. 

While there are perhaps more subtle versions of silencing, the obvious example appears in the film The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie.  Throughout this film various conversations are overwhelmed by external sounds such as sirens or airplanes.  These sounds eliminate all possibility of hearing what is being said.  In this film it is done for comical effect, but the same principle applies to all films. It is the denial of one sound, which should be heard, by the introduction of another sound.  When you silence something you allow it to speak without sound.  It therefore becomes “mute” in the sense that I’ve mentioned above.

The Silent Character

The silent character has a long tradition in both film and drama. Whether it is Shakespeare's mute, who is the witness without a voice, the writer and director Kevin Smith, who appears in his own films as the character Silent Bob, or the lone cowboy who's power lies in the eyes which peer from underneath the twisted rim of his hat, they take on tremendous power by denying their voice in a medium of sound.

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