Being Inside Her Silence: Silence and Performance in Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar Sarah Artt, Edinburgh Napier University

Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies Issue 25 February 2013 Being Inside Her Silence: Silence and Performance in Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar Sarah Artt, Edinburgh Napier University Silence as an aesthetic strategy has characterized the work of a number of female filmmakers. From Claire Denis to Moufida Tlatli, the silence of women in the cinema has been remarked upon extensively. Initially, the absence of women (as both active characters and directors) was lamented by feminists who sought to advance a new kind of women‘s cinema that departed from the conventions and traditions of melodrama. With the emergence of directors such as Agnes Varda, Denis and Sally Potter and the discovery and reclamation of the work of Dorothy Arzner and Alice Guy Blâché, the voices of female directors in the cinema have not only emerged but diversified tremendously. The deployment of silence as a strategy, as opposed to silence as absence, has frequently been a part of the work of directors that emerged from an avant-garde art practice (such as Potter). However, silence and how it is deployed within the narrative may also be considered a profound feminist intervention that underscores the long history of women‘s silence as absence or lack of agency within filmmaking practice and within the diegesis of narrative cinema. Other critics such as Des O‘Rawe have remarked on silence in the work of particular auteurist and avant-garde directors: [T]he creative way in which [certain filmmakers] were separating the ‗colours‘ of silences (a complete dead space on the sound track, studio silence, silence in the country, and so forth) [...] [and] rediscovering the spectrum of silence assisted in the creation of new aesthetic modalities, new ways of configuring alienation and fragmentation, absence and the asynchronicities of Being. (O‘Rawe, 2006: 402-403) While this is undoubtedly an important consideration in the deployment of silence and different technical and aesthetic strategies for creating an audible space for silence in cinema, there is a considerable difference between the ―dead space on the soundtrack'‖ common to Jean-Luc Godard‘s work and the rich subtleties of the texture of silence in Lynne Ramsay‘s Morvern Callar (2002), which is profoundly concerned with conveying a sense of being inside its protagonist‘s silence. Samantha Morton‘s performance as Morvern, alongside the film‘s use of music, allows the viewer to experience something of what it is like to experience silence as an individual, personal state of being. Here, we are invited into a variety of silences, particularly the sensuous enjoyment of silence in nature, as well as the contemplative silence of the quiet or taciturn person. The portrayal of the introverted individual‘s silence is somewhat rare in cinema. Here, we experience the world not just as Morvern Callar 1 Artt sees it, but the way she hears it and speaks into it, and those times when she chooses not to hear it or speak into it. Music and performance work in tandem to offer a kind of architecture of the individual‘s silence. These elements create a structure that allows the viewer to inhabit a world where speech is not paramount. In this sense, music and performance work to privilege silence as something to be experienced, rather than an awkwardness to be overcome. Morvern‘s silence is not the numb absence of thought, but rather the rich and imaginative world of the introvert. O‘Rawe also revisits the work of Bela Balazs on silence, and certain ideas are worth highlighting here, particularly in relation to performance: [T]he physiognomy of men [sic] is more intense when they are silent. More than that, in silence even things drop their mask and seem to look at you with wide-open eyes. If a sound film shows us any object surrounded by the noises of everyday life and then suddenly cuts out all sound and brings it up to us in isolated close- up, then the physiognomy of that object takes on a significance and tension that seems to provoke and invite the event which is to follow. (Balazs, 1952: 206-207) Balazs‘s comment on the power of objects in the frame when surrounded by silence is particularly significant for Morvern Callar, where not just the face of the protagonist but also her body takes on this significance he suggests. Balazs‘s work, first published in and translated from Russian in the early 1950s, conveys the unthinking gender bias of that period in its focus on the phrase ―the physiognomy of men is more intense when they are silent.‖ However, this phrase also resonates with some of the writing that exists on stars and performance, particularly the work of male Method actors such as Al Pacino. Although female stars have been examined for their facial performances (Roland Barthes‘ essay ―The Face of Garbo,‖ for instance), their bodily performance is not always examined unless it is a sexual one, such as the focus on the body of the femme fatale in film noir and the bodily performances of desire as displayed by actors like Rita Hayworth and Barbara Stanwyck. Any discussion of performance naturally includes a discussion of facial expression, but crucially, Samantha Morton‘s performance as the central character in Morvern Callar does not rely solely on the face for expression. In Morvern Callar, the titular protagonist‘s silence is a defining quality of the narrative in both Alan Warner‘s novel and in Ramsay‘s film. Samantha Morton‘s performance as Morvern imbues silence with a richness and diversity that goes beyond the deep focus on the face of the actor common to classical melodrama. Instances of silence or near- silence on the soundtrack of the film itself recalls the deliberate discomfort of the powerful uses of silence in postcolonial cinema such as Tlatli‘s Samt el-qusur/The Silences of the Palace (1994) or Denis‘ White Material (2010). Silence in Morvern Callar therefore takes on several potential levels of meaning and constitutes a technique that is both 2 Issue 25, February 2013 Being Inside Her Silence feminist and postcolonial in its intervention. Produced in the wake of Scotland‘s increasing devolution, Morvern Callar may be seen to deliberately draw on forms of representation that are common in postcolonial cinema. [1] Yet the film is very much an exploration of the deeply personal silence of a single individual. Both Morton‘s performance and the film‘s varied use of silence envelop the viewer in a world that is rich in different kinds of silence. In ―The Aesthetics of Silence,‖ Susan Sontag discusses silence in the work of art: ―A good deal of contemporary art is moved by this quest for a consciousness purified of contaminated language and, in some versions, of the distortions produced by conceiving the world exclusively in conventional verbal (in their debased sense, ‗rational‘ or ‗logical‘) terms‖ (1969: 22). This idea of contaminated language coincides with John Caughie‘s comment on Ramsay‘s film: ―perhaps the most scandalous transgression of all in the adaptation from novel to film [...] the translation of Morvern Callar herself, emphatically Scottish in speech and lineage in the novel, into an English interloper‖ (2007: 106). Yet, the film‘s deployment of silence both in the sense of Morvern‘s taciturnity and the filling up of the acoustic space with music (something that occurs in both the novel and the film) rather than speech can be seen as an act that transcends accent and speech. We need only consider the subtitling of Danny Boyle‘s film adaptation of Trainspotting (1996) for its North American release to realize the significance of subtitling accented speech. While subtitling different languages for global markets enables understanding, the subtitling of ―Englishes‖ for an anglophone audience remains contentious as it categorizes accented speech as a foreign language. The issue of ―translation‖ in the sense commented upon by Caughie is a fraught one for Scotland. However, Morvern Callar‘s silence may be viewed as a silence that conveys multiple riches – her silence is mystical, sullen, confused, contemplative, and joyful. The significance of Morvern‘s differing silences (and in turn, the way that these silences are conveyed through Samantha Morton‘s performance as Morvern in the film) may be seen as an example of other ideas raised by Caughie in relation to Scotland and its literature and film in a post-devolution era. Morvern Callar‘s silence may in fact allow for a representation of ―a space for difference [...] not just trying on national identities but imagining not having one‖ (Caughie, 2007: 103). It is this quality of a protagonist who is willingly without a country or a nationality that makes Ramsay‘s film appealing in a transnational era and potentially aligns her work with that of directors like Tony Gatliff and Fatih Akin. Where Gatliff and Akin are proponents of the transnational and the transplanted, Ramsay‘s proposal of a protagonist without a country is radical and exciting. The fact that her protagonist is a woman makes this doubly so. It is the film‘s very lack of easy specificity in its use of silence (rather than the emphasis placed on Scottish dialect in Trainspotting, for example) that make it both a liberating and troubling text for those who see Ramsay‘s film as a Issue 25, February 2013 3 Artt possible emblem of Scottish cinema. Later in the same article, Caughie asks us to consider the blank stare of Morvern fading up from and out of the strobe in the final clubbing scene: a blank stare which invites us to put meaning on it – despair? realisation? awakening? – without giving us the means of determining which meaning to put.

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