Four steps towards the words of silence in cinema

Abstract

When you inquire about silence, you discover that you are being summoned to relate it, in a unique way, to a lack or absence of speech, sound or writing. That summons concerns a certain imaginary that requires consideration and placing it in a descriptive enunciation of lack and absence. When thinking about silence in cinema, cinematographic theory has primarily adopted this narrativity to conceptualize it. This article determines a step forward and reconsiders what has previously been thought, providing silence with an envelope unlike that practised up to now. If we start from the fact that everything people do is constructed in a context and that the cinematographic takes place in its “listening-visible” action, then a disturbing question is proposed: is silence heard in cinema? This article shows how cinema has represented silence with its words, those commonly agreed that silence lacks. It is in the cinematographic essay that the representation of silence has been able to speak through the words that unfold. Filmmakers’ essayistic actions have staged the representation of the words that belong to silence, giving a listenable body to their thoughts and their ideas through their voice.