Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.
Interpretation
Film uniquely utilizes silence as a powerful artistic tool, unlike music and theater.
Walter Murch highlights the distinct ability of film to incorporate sustained periods of silence, allowing viewers to deeply engage with the narrative without the need for sound. This capability differentiates film as an art form, as it can maintain emotional and narrative intensity through silence, which both music and theater struggle to achieve.
In practice
When discussing the unique storytelling techniques of cinema at a film studies class.
You can always make a film somehow. You can beg, borrow, steal the equipment, use credit cards, use your friends' goodwill, wheedle your way into this or that situation. The real problem is, how do you get people to see it once it is made?
Film editing is now something almost everyone can do at a simple level and enjoy it, but to take it to a higher level requires the same dedication and persistence that any art form does.
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvelous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a 'cinematic' dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality.
There are many, many nouns for the act of looking - a glance, a glimpse, a peep - but there's no noun for the act of listening. In general, we don't think primarily about sound. So I have a different perspective on the world; I can construct soundscapes that have an effect on people, but they don't know why. It's a sort of subterfuge.
This applies to many film jobs, not just editing: half the job is doing the job, and the other half is finding ways to get along with people and tuning yourself in to the delicacy of the situation.
Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.
Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.
Those are miracles that no merely human brain can work. The artist is merely the sound conduct of a Force that dictates to him what he should do.
The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. … I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.
I was always writing for myself. I wrote what I needed to write and hear - that's what makes it powerful.
Logos are a graphic extension of the internal realities of a company.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.