Julie Taymor, the director of Frida, worked with the film's actors, camera people, video editors, and music director to create moments of silence throughout the film. This happened in different ways for different characters. Frida’s mother fell silent upon hearing things that upset her. Her silence was shown through a surprised or displeased facial expression.
During the automobile crash, the actors were a concert of facial expressions and slow motion falling. They were verbally silent but the environment was not-we heard glass breaking all around them. The sound of breaking glass was isolated, prioritized.
Frida’s silence often came during trauma or anguish. We saw her silence when she was cast, recast, having the cast taken off. She was silent when her boyfriend left; when she ran out of the room after being grabbed. She showed this silence through eye contact, zoning out, or looking down.
Frida is also silent with concentration, a mode that takes directed eye contact: drawing butterflies on her cast, trying to walk again, drawing her self-portrait, drawing the fetus, cutting her hair, drinking the most tequila, dancing. These actions are not possible without her gaze on each step as it unfolds next to the last one.
Taymor shows us that with silence comes consequence, we are trained by her command: “Wait for IT”. First you drink the most tequila THEN you dance with a ‘beautiful’ woman. If we can tolerate the silence we will be rewarded.
To create a text with silence that Taymor and her audiences would likely read I could try writing:
-Panoramic noticings of the environment but not the characters in that environment
-In depth studies of character’s facial expressions
-Comparisons of current silent interaction in relationship to a previous sound-filled one
Text makes a signal onto a blank page, distinguishing itself from that blank page. Silence in a text must be signified as well. These significations make noise in the reader’s mind or when read out loud. How do we create silent silence? There must be something more than white space on the page.
Hi Sailor,
ReplyDeleteThere's a way that, functionally speaking, I think that silence is as much an absence of sound as it is the withholding of particular sounds. In the movie, for instance, some of the most silent moments were supported by the elegance of the score. Sound was still very much coming at us, but only a particular sound. The voices are withheld. In the case of the bus crash, we know that there is sound. We know that people are screaming, that tires are screeching, that glass is shattering, metal is crunching, and bones are breaking. These sounds are not specifically absent from the scene - we know they are there, whether we hear them or not - but they are withheld from our experience of it. In text, I imagine this effect working in similar ways. In a car crash, providing detailed descriptions of the eyes of each passenger, or on the sound of adult contemporary tunes coming from the supermarket that will in a few seconds have a new entryway, fixes the attention on particular sounds or images, while depriving the reader of other sounds, often expected or known ones. On even a more microtextual level, it occurs to me that there are "noisy" sounds (those ejective K's and T's, and perhaps less so those plosive P's and B's), where the sound of the letter is almost literally a pressurized explosion behind the tongue or lips, and "quiet" sounds (whispering, susurrus S's and murmuring, mumbling M's). On the same scale, on can track "hard" and "soft" vowels. This suggests to me another way to create "true" silence, which is to say to make the absence of noise obvious by demonstrating that it is being withheld from our experience as opposed to simply not being there at all. By paying attention to sounds in a passage, you can provide skilled contrast between "noisy" scenes and "quiet" ones.
Which is all, I suppose, just a long-winded way to say: "There is a falling tree somewhere making as much noise as it possibly can on the way down, and yet...."
There is some added value here as Sailor and then Garrett unveil ways that expression can be loud in the silence. This is something the writer can do in the narrative easily and get the effects for the moment. Also the correlation between waiting and holding the narrative (through details, say) is a great technique.
ReplyDeletenice,
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This is such a poetic rendition of the poetry of Frida, "a concert of faces"...nice description! Your zoomed-in look at the moments of silence also add a great deal of volume to the film, and how the viewer is rewarded. I believe the same is said for reading...enduring those white spaces, or complicated dialogues to unveil a larger story.
ReplyDelete-Margaret-