Film is falling in love with sound of silence
New movie trend strays from a generation of full dialogue with little to no talking
Some of the most notable scenes of the recent summer movie season involved great sights and spectacles — and little to no talking.
In several of the biggest upcoming fall releases, directors have crafted memorable characters out of a mute janitor, a deaf young girl and a nearsilent victim of a Cambodian genocide. Film dialogue is for suckers? After a generation of scripts from the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin celebrated the motormouthed and the silver-tongued, many directors are embracing a new moment. They’re making movies that include long stretches without speech or even sound.
Modern moviemaking is rife with countertrends, reactions to oncenovel ideas that have since grown tired. A boomlet in practical effects succeeded years of CG overkill.
Now another formerly hot cinema notion may be getting dragged to the rubbish pile: talking.
“I’m a big fan of silent cinema,” director Christopher Nolan says, “telling the story primarily pictorially and through sound and music.
“(W)hat’s exciting about movies right now,” he adds, “is being taken to a world you would never normally travel to in a primarily visual sense.”
Nolan would know. If this past summer was a time of peak silence in film, the Brit was a key reason why. His smash Second World War picture Dunkirk chronicled a heroic beach rescue by often using little more than the sharp images and unique sounds of conflict.
Ninety years after The Jazz Singer signalled the end of the silent film era, dialogue-free movies are a new and, many filmmakers say, welcome development in a medium constantly seeking fresh ideas. But the trend also raises questions about the definition of cinema in the 21st century, not least whether it could undermine one of the most treasured as- pects of movie-going.
Examples of conversational minimalism abound. In Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes, one of the summer’s best-reviewed films, scenes unfurl in silence as apes communicate via looks and sign language.
And in one of the season’s indie breakouts, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, Casey Affleck’s character haunts the action by silently watching over his former partner (Rooney Mara).
The trend continues this fall. Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, an early Oscars-season front-runner after its warm reception at festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, is notable because it features a mute janitor played by Sally Hawkins who’s mainly given expression through her eyes, hands and the film’s score.
Or Wonderstruck, Todd Haynes’ mystical October release about two deaf young people across 50 years of time. Half of the movie, set primarily in 1927 New York, plays like a silent film, with no spoken dialogue.
Even Angelina Jolie’s historical drama First They Killed My Father —a Netflix film about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign in 1970s Cambodia — is characterized by its young heroine’s dearth of dialogue.
Directors cite a number of explanations for the switch. An artistic pendulum-swing is one: if so many auteurs have been mining dialogue for so many years, maybe it’s time to go another way and ratchet it down, they say.
Technology has also played a role. It’s never been this inexpensive to create high-end images.
But the directors also raise social explanations; asking if, in a time of cable-news blather and social-media pontification, the cinema establishment is reacting in kind. Film may be going quieter because the world has gotten noisier. Movie theatres are now a refuge from the yammering.
Filmmakers say they increasingly realize that silence, more than just offering a moment of contrast or a simple breather, can be a device in its own right.
“The movie is in love with love and in love with cinema,” Del Toro says of the decisions he made for Shape of Water. “And when you fall in love, if it’s not through song, words are entirely useless. And I thought, ‘I want the connection to be in the eyes of the actor or actress and for that connection to be beyond talking.’
“What does love do? It renders you mute.”
It’s understandable that for so long so many great movies would contain sharp dialogue — it’s the most fun for screenwriters, not to mention actors. But directors (some of whom, of course, also write or act) say that such thinking overlooks the joys of silence.
“My favourite (part) is we’re able to just do behavioural things,” Reeves says. “The great thing about this is that that experience is part of what people are coming to see, to submit to this very uncanny experience where they’re seeing emotions and thoughts that flicker in the eyes of apes.”
To be sure, movie chatter isn’t going anywhere. Even in Baby Driver, where long stretches of the action are conveyed through the eyes and music-synced motions of Ansel Elgort’s hands and feet, director Edgar Wright wrote some of the year’s sharpest fast talk for Kevin Spacey’s crime boss.