ABSTRACT
Silence is style, but is also an emotional core. With Stephen Prince's term turned paradox, silence becomes an unlikely 'amplification' of violent deaths: 100 decibels of soundless bloodshed. 'Construed as representation', Rick Altman continues, 'sound inherits the double mantle of art.' As the cinematic world floods with vengeance and blood, its sounds, speech and noises have drained away. Jack Robin takes the stage at Coffee Dan's restaurant Singing the last verse of 'Dirty hands, dirty face', he pulls up the collar of his suit jacket, acting the part of a weary man returning home, hunched against the cold. Relative to many other scenes in silenced worlds, the imagery of music-making and dancing not only characterizes people expectations for Nosferatu's soundscape, but focuses them in a peculiar way. In Nosferatu, the image of commotion bereft of sound is an image of a crisis: a world bereft of meaning in which people are unable to participate.
