‘What was given up in giving up the silence of film?’ This essay argues that what was ‘given up’ was never silence per se but rather forms of critical writing attentive to the expressive functions of silence within sound cinema. Although some major texts on film sound have addressed formal and structural aspects of silence (such as Eisenstein, Balázs, Burch, and Chion), there has been no attempt to articulate an intellectually coherent aesthetics of film silence. This essay traces the ‘invention of silence’ across a range of contexts: in ‘silent sound’ films of the early 1930s; in the spectre of the acousmêtre and the gestures of the mute character; and in the discontinuities, ellipses and gaps created by the European modernists (such as Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Godard, and Dreyer), and others. The question of silence is central – not marginal – to practices, theories, and histories of film sound, and to any serious consideration of the complex relations between cinema and modernism.
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved