Brakhage and the Birth of Silence
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English Publications English Winter 2019 Brakhage and the Birth of Silence Justin Remes Iowa State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/engl_pubs Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons The complete bibliographic information for this item can be found at https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ engl_pubs/281. For information on how to cite this item, please visit http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ howtocite.html. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Publications by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Brakhage and the Birth of Silence Abstract Discussions of “silent cinema” have generally focused on films made during the silent era (1894–1929). Even after the spread of synchronized sound, however, several experimental filmmakers created films without soundtracks, purely visual experiences that challenged cinema’s status as a multisensory medium. This article gives close attention to Stan Brakhage’s 1959 film Window Water Baby Moving as a way of outlining some of the effects of cinematic silence, such as aesthetic ambiguity and a heightened awareness of cinema’s visual rhythms. Disciplines Film and Media Studies Comments This article is published as Remes, Justin. "Brakhage and the Birth of Silence." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 2 (2019): 71-90. DOI: 10.1353/cj.2019.0003. Posted with permission. This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/engl_pubs/281 Brakhage and the Birth of Silence Justin Remes JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Volume 58, Number 2, Winter 2019, pp. 71-90 (Article) Published by University of Texas Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0003 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/717123 [ Access provided at 20 Apr 2020 21:58 GMT from Iowa State University ] Brakhage and the Birth of Silence by JUSTIN REMES Abstract: Discussions of “silent cinema” have generally focused on fi lms made during the silent era (1894–1929). Even after the spread of synchronized sound, however, several experimental fi lmmakers created fi lms without soundtracks, purely visual experi- ences that challenged cinema’s status as a multisensory medium. This article gives close attention to Stan Brakhage’s 1959 fi lm Window Water Baby Moving as a way of outlining some of the effects of cinematic silence, such as aesthetic ambiguity and a heightened awareness of cinema’s visual rhythms. Why must one always talk? Often one shouldn’t talk, but live in silence. —Nana, Vivre sa vie ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special—when you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence. —Mia, Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1993) n one of the most memorable scenes of Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964), Odile (Anna Karina), Franz (Sami Frey), and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) loiter and engage in idle chatter in a crowded café (as so often happens in fi lms of the nouvelle vague). After an uncomfortable silence laced with ennui, Franz asserts: “Okay. If there’s nothing left to say, let’s have a minute of silence.”1 IUnimpressed by the recommendation, Odile bluntly retorts, “You can really be dumb sometimes.” But Franz persists: “A minute of silence can be a long time. A real minute of silence takes forever.” Unable to think of a better way to way to pass the time, Odile concedes: “Okay. One, two, three.” What happens next is remarkable: actual silence. Godard does not simply revisit the awkward silence that the characters shared a few seconds ago. Instead, he completely eliminates all noises from the fi lm’s soundtrack. One retroactively real- izes how noisy the previous silence was. While the fi lm’s central characters may not have spoken for several seconds, the café was still replete with the sounds of foot- steps, chatter, and clanking silverware. During this new, purer silence, the charac- ters exchange vacant glances. Arthur raises his eyebrows and purses his lips. Franz takes a couple of drags on his cigarette. Odile rests her chin on her right hand. 1 Translations from the French are taken from the Criterion DVD of Band of Outsiders, released in 2003. Justin Remes is an assistant professor of fi lm studies at Iowa State University who has written articles for Cinema Journal, Screen, and Film-Philosophy. His fi rst book,Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (Columbia University Press, 2015), analyzes fi lms without movement. His forthcoming book Absence in Cinema (under contract © 2019 by the University of Texas Press © 2019 by the University of Texas with Columbia University Press) investigates erasures of sound and imagery in experimental fi lm. www.cmstudies.org Winter 2019 | 58 | No. 2 71 JCMS 58 | No. 2 | Winter 2019 After approximately thirty-four seconds, Franz breaks the silence: “That’s enough. I’ll put a record on.” Why does Godard cut this “minute” of silence in half ? Would a full minute prove too arduous for his characters? His audience? Both? Was the abruptness of the break simply an index of Godard’s restlessness—most famously exemplified by the ubiquitous jump cuts of his first film,À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960)? In any case, the moment that Franz speaks, the cacophony of the café returns and the silence is broken. It is worth lingering on the precise species of silence that Godard has created here. It is not the silence of so-called silent cinema, as most silent films were projected with live or recorded music. (Some screenings even included additional aural elements, such as sound effects and live narration.) It is also not the silence that tends to intermit- tently punctuate sound films, a quasi silence teeming with ambient sounds: creaking stairs, crickets, wind. The silence of Bande à part is a radical silence. By eliminating sound altogether, Godard challenges film’s status as a multisensory medium, momen- tarily transforming the cinematic encounter into one of pure visuality. Godard is not the first filmmaker, however, to excise sound from cinema. There is a rich tradition of silence in experimental cinema, one that reaches its apex in the films of Stan Brakhage. In this article, I explore some of the functions of cinematic silence by giving especially close attention to Brakhage’s landmark film Window Water Baby Moving (1959), a bold and uncompromising experiment that documents the birth of Stan and Jane Brakhage’s first child, Myrrena. By removing the soundtrack from images that seem to demand an auditory supplement—such as a screaming woman in labor and a crying newborn child—Brakhage creates a disorienting and defamiliarizing cinematic experience. I argue that Window Water Baby Moving’s lack of a soundtrack re- flects Brakhage’s distrust of language and his antipathy toward the facile sound-image relationships of mainstream cinema. I also argue that Brakhage’s silence creates a musicality of vision by foregrounding the optical rhythms of the film’s editing. Finally, I explore the ways that Brakhage’s silent aesthetic is related to—but also distinct from— that of his mentor, John Cage. “Music for the Eyes”: A Brief History of Cinematic Silence Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter. —John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” To better understand what might have inspired Brakhage to make films without soundtracks, it will be helpful to briefly examine some precedents for his cinematic silences. What was the first truly silent film? This is a fiendishly difficult question to answer. After all, exhibition approaches varied greatly in the first several decades of cinema history, and the same film could be projected in silence in one theater and with musical accompaniment in another. While many accounts of the silent era insist that “‘silent’ cinema was never silent” (i.e., that music always supplemented cinematic imagery), Rick Altman has persuasively argued that “silence was in fact a regular practice of silent film exhibition,” particularly before 1910.2 Furthermore, there were certain rare filmmakers of the silent era who insisted that their films should be projected 2 Rick Altman, “The Silence of the Silents,” Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 648–718, 649. 72 JCMS 58 | No. 2 | Winter 2019 in silence. The Swedish artist Viking Eggeling, for example, “unequivocally instructed his friends never to add a musical score” to Symphonie diagonale (1924), because this abstract film was already a kind of “music for the eyes.”3 But what if we limit our inquiry to the era of the talkie? Who was the first film- maker to forgo the use of synchronized sound to construct a film designed to be viewed in complete silence? To the best of my knowledge, that honor goes to the German American abstract animator Oskar Fischinger. While Fischinger is best remembered for films that combine colorful abstract imagery with music (such as Composition in Blue [1935], An Optical Poem [1937], and Motion Painting No. 1 [1947]), he maintained that “a film can be even more beautiful without music.”4 To put this hypothesis to the test, in 1942 he created a little-known masterpiece called Radio Dynamics, in which sinuous and sensuous shapes appear and disappear at precisely timed intervals without any sonic accompaniment. In fact, because Fischinger knew that many venues would see the film’s lack of a soundtrack as an invitation to add their own, he added a title card to the begin- ning of the film that reads, “Please!No music.