Silence, Maastricht and Amsterdam, video
Three weeks, one topic, one medium. For this assignment at IArts, I choose to research silence in film. How is silence used? How to visualize silence? Those are the questions I began with. It brought me to many more, like How do we experience silence? and What are the reasons filmmakers use silence in their film? After researching silence itself, I experimented with making short videos with the topic. I made twelve videos in which I used or visualized many different kinds of silence. Some more literal and some more abstract.
The first three videos are called ‘sleep’, ‘city sounds’, and ‘bus stop’. These are all thought out scenes, with people playing a role in them. They are stories about experiencing silence, out of real life. For example in the video bus stop, the way silence can be experienced as awkward is shown in a situation most have encountered in their life. The second three videos, called ‘wind’, ‘organizing’, and ‘sticks’, are all visualizing an aspect of silence. I tried to let the viewer experience the concept of silence better, by adding the visuals. Then you see three videos, called ‘group setting one and two’, and ‘alone’. These are all experiments. I want to show how silence is experienced with real human facial expressions. The last three videos are called, ‘bridge’, ‘sitting’, and ‘water’. These are also visualizing an aspect of silence. For example, in the video sitting, a woman is sitting in nature. It gets quieter the closer the shot is to her face. When you think it is silent, you can still hear a heartbeat and breathing. I show the idea of silence not existing for humans because you will always hear your own body sounds. I chose to see this project as an opportunity to experiment. In the videos, you will see this back. I used a lot of different film techniques to find out how it works. The only thing the videos all have in common is the topic of silence.
I was intrigued by the idea of trying to visualize something, that is not experienced with seeing. I also wanted to dive into the topic of silence, to be able to make more conscious sound choices in my next film projects. It led to me being more aware of sound. In film, the sound is half of the experience. In my earlier made videos, the sound always came after the visuals. I saw I needed to give this topic more attention. If you remove most of the sounds to create a silent moment in a movie, there needs to be more focused attention. I see it with myself. If I watch a silent movie, for example, I am way faster distracted. I am not used to films where there is more silence or a more slow tempo at all. My attention span gets shorter, and I see it with a lot of other people around me as well. I think we need to be more aware of that and learn ourselves again to have full attention for silent moments. I hope you can cherish the silence in the videos.
