Photographer Jerry Thompson worked as Walker Evans' principal assistant from 1973 to Evans' death in 1975. In his 2013 publication Why Photography Matters, Thompson writes the following:

"Fox Talbot, and the cohort including Evans and Cartier-Bresson seven decades later, proposed a new kind of epistemology, a new, hitherto impossible way of learning about the world [...] The opposite of Mathema (a model projected to enable understanding), Pathema is an experience passively received: acquiescence to what is seen [...] When a pathema holds sway, the artist will no longer be Master of the Universe. He or she will be instead an attentive observer, a willing participant in, perhaps a servant of, a system larger than that artist's individual, personal, particular needs." (Jerry L. Thompson, Why Photography Matters, p.14-15)

How might this epistemological perspective be relevant to filmmaking with sound?

*Homo Sapiens* [2016] dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” - John Cage, Lectures and Writings

A lack of dialogue suggests a kind of silence. But the world beyond human language is anything but silent. The absence of words, or any sense of overt musical score, discloses the space for the sounds of the world, both real and imagined, to be heard and felt.

Film Selection:

Il Buco [2021] dir. Michelangelo Frammartino
Cemetery [2019] dir. Carlos Casas
Homo Sapiens [2016] dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter
A Spell to Ward Off the Darness [2013] dir. Ben Rivers & Ben Russell
Le Quattro Volte [2010] dir. Michelangelo Frammartino
Hukkle [2002] dir. György Pálfi

The quiet can be unsettling, disorientating. The absence of sound can suggest social isolation, remoteness.

Such spaces can reveal the sonic activity already present within them; a naked cough is exposed in the hush of the library, a shuffling of feet suddenly violates the quiet.

*Carnival of Souls* [1962] dir. Herk Harvey

Sudden unexpected changes to a sensory input arouse attention. These can manifest as feelings of discomfort and fear. In the 1962 horror film Carnival of Souls, organist Mary Henry emerges from a department store changing room only to discover that the world has suddenly fallen silent. She no longer can hear anything from the environment around her. All is mute. The only sounds she can hear are her own voice and footsteps. Later she reports to the doctor:

"It was more than just not being able to hear anything. Or make contact with anyone. It was though...as though for a time I didn't exist. As though I had no place in the world. No part of the life around me.”

Derealisation is described as an alteration in one's perception of the world. Depersonalisation is an alteration in one’s perception of self, often observing the body and mind from outside at a distance. Such dissociative disorders are ways for the mind to cope with stress and trauma. Manipulation of mental dissociative states through targeted sound design (e.g. changing sound levels, use of silence) is commonly used to heighten subjective states in many genres of narrative filmmaking.

In Ikiru [1952], director Akira Kurosawa allows the dreaded news of the protagonist’s health to hang in the air in silence. Lost in thought Watanabe leaves the hospital, slowly exiting out on to a city street devoid of all sound. A large truck suddenly passes by, awakening him from his introspection. The cacophony of the city violently returns.

For Alfred Hitchcock, the artificial silencing of a victim at a particular moment operates at the most provocative level - the spectator is affected not by what is seen or heard, but what is imagined. In a famous scene from Frenzy [1972], Hitchcock abruptly cuts the sound of the outside world after Barbara "Babs" Milligan enters the murderer’s flat. As the door closes, the camera smoothly and silently tracks back down the stairs before slowly returning to the bustling city life outside. In this sequence the use of silence over the continuous tracking shot heightens the grim, inevitable fate that awaits Babs. She is alone and helpless. No one outside is aware of what is about to happen. No one, that is, except the spectator, who plays out the scene in their own mind.

Discussing the unique role sound performs in his own equally violent film Benny’s Video [1992], Austrian director Michael Haneke elaborates on this Hitchcock approach:

“With an image, you cut the imagination short. With an image, you see what you see and its 'reality'. With sound, just like words, you incite the imagination. And that’s why for me it's always more efficient, if I want to touch someone emotionally, to use sound rather than image.”