Silence, sounds, and Tabu

For all its glib meretriciousness, The Artist prompted thoughts about how silent cinema works, and how and why its techniques might be related to modern technology and film-making custom. Nostalgia and wonder increase along with distance in time, as silent cinema ascends to the status of a lost art. It’s in the air: for all its gross faults, Hugo’s ecstatic cinematic evangelism reached many; the 2013 Goya nominations are mostly dedicated to a (less than successful but handsomely-mounted) silent retelling of Snow White, Blancanieves; and a slick and expensive Valentino biopic starring Isabella Rossellini (not as Valentino, sadly) is due to wind up its years-long production within months [eventually Silent Life, 2020].

The spectacle of Méliès’ silent magic has never really left the cinema: the dumbest, dialogue-free, digitally-created action sequence of today (anytime, really) could easily, probably preferably, have its stock movie score and library explosions replaced by a vigorous organ player. The point is to excite through adventure and fantasy. As such, cinema remains cinema, with or without synch sound. Vast swathes of experimental film-makers have felt no need for a soundtrack. It is a formal consideration like any other. Plenty of so-to-speak arthouse film-makers pare their dialogue to a minimum or, like Marguerite Duras (India Song) divorce sound and image entirely. The earliest semi-mainstream experiment along these lines had Ray Milland suffer torments as a secret-selling nuclear physicist, whilst footfall, phone bells, and whatnot are heard, but not a line of dialogue, in the intermittently effective but largely off-putting 1952 independent The Thief.

Mostly, though, it’s comedians who embrace the absence of dialogue. Tati’s bubbling soundtracks are the appropriately banal white noise of the quotidien, but he’d be no less funny with an out-of-tune upright accompaniment. The association of silent cinema with comedy, however, has mostly been because of a widespread discrepancy in frame rates. In anything as low as 16fps, uniformly projected at 24, people just scurry. No wonder then that Silent Movie (1976) was the first high-profile sound-era silent feature, nor that the sped-up parts actually made Mel Brooks funny.

No dialogue is one thing, but no synch sound at all is another. It’s interesting as Silent Movie opens with a complete lack of sound how disconcerting it is – it plays like a spoof of the avant-garde. That’s in part because it’s in color. For the ghostly visual aura of silent cinema, one need look no further than Guy Maddin, but there have been others who’ve gone the whole homage hog. Most intriguingly, there’s Jérôme Savary’s 1975 semi-pornographic circus movie, La fille du garde-barrière, in look and sound if not quite in content, a recreation of silent cinema; Aki Kaurismaki made his typically downplayed Juha (1999) as a traditional silent, more to evoke an era than to throw shadows over everything; and the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s Call of Cthulhu (2005) is a largely successful exercise in both. These films, as with The Artist and Blancanieves, do capture some of the beauty of silent cinema, the seeming magic of wordless communication, and the transport to another time. But the straight recreations, even the more satisfying examples, seem designed to amaze that they have even stood on their hindlegs at all – silent cinema as a fetish.

There’s room for more interrogation of silent cinema’s sound and image disjunction, and the different significances of direct and synch sound, or lack thereof. Some synching of music and sound effects in Blancanieves, for example, feels like flashy cheating rather than as a considered device. On the other hand, Hsiao-hsien Hou uses intertitles and soundless, moving lips in the 1911-set section of his Three Times (2005), but shoots in rich, deep color and natural light to avoid the straitjacket of stylistic recreation. The conceit is persuasive in conjuring a bygone time, but Hou also bends the rules in a highly effective fashion, by privileging his main character with synch sound, as she sings to her own melancholy lute accompaniment, inevitably drawing us closer.

The most intriguing recent experiment with the form and effectiveness of silent cinema occupies the whole second half of Miguel Gomes’ strange and beautiful Tabu (2012). A voiceover relates the events of 50 years previous, in the shadow of (the fictitious) Mount Tabu, in an unnamed Portuguese colony in Africa. Black and white 16mm photography provides a silvery sheen of agedness; the story of forbidden love evokes the Tabu of Murnau (1931); and grasses rustle, cicadas cheep, but the characters’ lips move soundlessly. The project is not one of recreation, nor a nostalgic evocation of silent cinema, but an attempt to use characteristics of silent cinema to evoke nostalgia itself, the bittersweet mourning for a lost time (in this instance, labeled “Paradise”). This is pretty much a case of saudade, as Portuguese as can be, an emotion to feel but not describe, just as one cannot quite describe how the distance of years, and the absence of sound, makes silent cinema feel like a dream.

Direct and synch sound make us feel present; their noticeable absence is an immediate distancing device; and more complex relationships to the film before us can be conjured by a mixture of the two. Withholding of dialogue aside, Tabu is free from an over-strict schema, either literal or symbolic. It is as though Gomes is feeling his way in each scene, deciding which sounds, dialogue aside, will best bolster the images. It’s disarming enough when, half way through the film, words cease to emerge from the characters’ mouths; more so even, when the splashes of a swimming pool suddenly go unheard. In fact, Gomes might have benefitted from further erasures of direct sound; the more we hear of the world around them, the less comfortable the characters’ silence becomes.

But this is an experiment – there is no correct formal approach. In straight recreations of silent cinema one can point out cheats, but here the cheats are the point. No self-regarding replication, the wonder of Tabu is how it investigates the formal properties of pre-sound film in an attempt to channel its particular emotional power. The sense of distance in time comes easily, of course, but less so the emotional relationship between audience and characters whom they cannot hear. In Blancanieves, for example, that step of removal is a barrier; in Tabu, as in the best silent films, it is wonderland looking glass – we can both see though it, and see ourselves reflected in it.

Gomes’ smartest move, in fact, is relating his formal decisions as much to silent cinema as to home movies. His characters’ 16mm footage is made to look distinct from the story around it, but there’s no incontrovertible reason why it should. There is a built-in nostalgia to this too, for most people’s experience of home movies is direct-sound video; but the form of the home movie, from mid-century to mid-eighties, is recognizable and familiar – a less pristine image than that which we expect on a cinema screen, and an absence of sound. There’s a sense of intimacy, and a sense of loss – the faces can straddle the distance of years, but where have the voices gone? They were so sweet once, but they remain beyond our reach, locked away in the past. It sounds a lot like silent cinema.

d Miguel Gomes p Sandro Aguilar, Luís Urbano sc Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo ph Rui Poças ed Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes pd Bruno Duarte cast Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira, Teresa Madruga, Henrique Espírito Santo, Carloto Cotta, Ivo Müller
(2012, port/ger/bra/fr/sp, 118m, b/w)