How do we experience silence in movies?
I feel like when all the sound is removed, the audience fills the silence with their own thoughts. It makes for the audience to be less caught up in the film. With ambient sound, you are invited to really sit down in the silence. Be present in it and experience it better. When you don’t hear any ambient sound in the movie, it makes you hear the ambient sounds in real life, so it takes you out of the movie.
We are so used to ambient sounds, so we filter them out. Most of the time I see a movie and think that it is silent, there will be ambient sounds. I put this to the test. I went two times to Lumiere and focused on the ‘silent’ moments. I went to ‘Corpus Christi’ from Jan Komasa. This movie takes place in Poland. The protagonist is in jail and needs to work at a wood factory. His dream is to become a priest, but with his criminal record it is impossible. But one day he escapes to a village, where he tricks everyone into believing that he is a priest. He gets involved in a complex village drama.
I found only one moment of complete silence. It was at a very important moment, after shutting the church doors at his last preach. But throughout the whole film, there were a lot of silent moments with only ambient sounds. I am going to describe a couple of these scenes, and compare them. In the beginning of the movie, there is a scene in the dining room in yail. You hear a lot of loud voices and sounds of plates and spoons. But then someone enters the room. You see that the people in the room are still busy with eating and talking, but the sound slowly fades away. You get the feeling that this person must be very important for this movie. And you feel the tense of the protagonist. Maybe he is scared for this person? Another scene is a close up of the protagonist. There are people talking around him, but you only hear some soft murmur and a high beep. It makes you think the situation is mentally too much for the protagonist. Then the scene with complete silence. The protagonist needs to leave the village where he had made a whole new life for himself, and made deep connections. Now he speaks to the people of his better life for the last time, before getting back to jail. He walked out of the church, and shut the door with a hard hollow sound. And then it is totally silent. As a viewer I get even more emotionally involved because of this silence. It makes me soak into this feeling of the protagonist for a while instead of being distracted by sound. For me, in this moment, the silence did not take me out of the movie into real life. I was still very much sucked into the story. But I don’t think that would be the same in any other moment of the movie. And that is why I think they only used total silence on this point.
So in the first scene, silence created space to speculate in your mind about the relationship between the person walking in, and the protagonist. The second scene makes you more emotionally involved with the protagonist. And the last creates room to sit into an emotion for some time.
