ABSTRACT
Film, by necessity, first emerged as a silent medium. During the transition phase from silent cinema to talkies, one Russian who struggled to bring sound to film was Stephen Poliakoff’s paternal grandfather. The silence became an interminable seventh-inning stretch. Following the arrival of talkies, silences continued to play a role in many movies, being deployed for effect. This is evident in the highly acclaimed Japanese films of Akira Kurosawa, including Rashomon, High and Low, and Rhapsody in August. In respect of silences against which the oppressed must struggle, Pat Murphy’s Anne Devlin is an introspective and slow Irish film that deals with both colonialist and feminist themes. The former encompasses the signifying silences of actors, including pauses and gestures, while the latter refers to the dramatic background impact of a director avoiding speech and mood music. Silence is both a condition and a compositional feature of music.
