Beyond Words

Shhh: the use of silence in film

By Lisa Rosenberg

Even in the Bay Area, the quiet weeks of January remind us of the gifts of winter: a stillness, pause, and time of secret, subterranean growth. Similarly, silence and stillness can amplify the hidden dramatic qualities of your story on film. You can use them to capture your audience and draw them closer, anticipating something yet unseen. They can solicit a deeper focus on a character’s internal state. Silence can also establish a quality of place or an emotional tone.

A film such as Ballast (writer-director Lance Hammer, 2008), set among working class African Americans in the Mississippi delta, uses silence almost as a narrative weapon, daring the audience to stay put as the tension builds nearly unbearably among the three bereft central characters. The story of a brother, son and estranged wife struggling to move forward following a suicide, Ballast also uses silence to demarcate their intersecting internal deserts of loneliness and sorrow. After Darius kills himself, his brother Lawrence is nearly engulfed in silence until his own failed suicide attempt and the unobtrusive help of a neighbor bring him slowly back to the world of verbal expression. James, Darius’ young son and Lawrence’s nephew, inhabits a similar realm of nearly inexpressible turmoil, until a spare handful of words from Lawrence lead him to begin to find comfort in his father’s belongings, and to finally become part of an unexpected circle of family.

Some films that seem otherwise full of noise and action, such as Coco Before Chanel (writer-director Anne Fontaine, co-writer Camille Fontaine, 2009), use the quiet within a character to fascinate the audience and to give that character a psychological anchor. A biopic of famed French fashion designer Coco Chanel’s rough and uncertain early life, this film uses the silent core of her character as a separate, resounding note against the extravagant color and movement of Paris bars and clubs, street life, and lavish events staged by her wealthy clients. Early in the story, Coco’s silence seems a defense against unsureness and fear as she gathers her resources and charts a difficult path to an unusually rewarding life. Later, the stillness she holds within becomes a symbol of her hard-won self-knowledge and belief, becoming as potent a narrative device as is the familiar image, throughout the film, of her tiny figure dressed in unconventionally spare, monochromatic clothing against a visual spectacle of elaboration and distraction—like a small, elegantly delineated bird in a field of peacocks.

The Hurt Locker (director Kathryn Bigelow, writer Mark Boal, 2009), a story of bomb disabling technicians in 2004-era Iraq, uses strategically planted layers of quiet in and around the tensest scenes. While the camera finds watchful Iraqis in store doorways and on balconies, we hear only the labored breathing of the technician striding forward through the dry, ordinary rubble of rocks, dirt and trash that might mask anything at all. Silence in this story becomes a psychological riptide, drawing us deeply into the exhaustingly long moments, hours, and days of constant threat that the characters experience. It carries us close to the hidden world of the protagonist’s psyche, to his stoic concentration and internal armor. It also works thematically, reflecting the weariness, banality, and finally, inexplicability of war—reduced to the simplest reality of one desperate soldier in the stillness of the desert, focusing a long-distance scope at the enemy, aimed at eradicating any sign of life.

Séraphine (writer-director Martin Provost, co-writer Marc Abdelnour, 2008), based on the life of early 20th Century French naïve painter Séraphine de Senlis, uses the character’s nearly mute, marginally articulate state to offer what words she does speak as welcome surprises. An artist who created in a state of rapture, her work hidden and undetected for years until an art dealer unexpectedly discovered her, the real Séraphine seems to have lived an internal life perched on a fragile boundary between creative passion and insanity, and spent her last years in an asylum. But on the screen, Séraphine’s often silent, yet physically expressive character becomes a gravitational force, drawing us toward her aura of great internal mystery. Though the film is filled with exuberant color and life, especially in its depiction of Séraphine’s artistic inspiration and finished works, the silence of her character creates a necessary counterpoint, suggesting the weight of a whole person hidden and even unified within—well worth the discovery that our careful attention may yield.

topics: actors, authors, bay area, screenwriting

01.25.2010