The Sound of Silence is a movie where the dialogues and the words are deprived of their communicative function. The excess of words empties the language of any meaning and reduces it to just a simple reflection of society’s impositions and censors.

He is a gigolo, she is a prostitute. They lie to one another, hiding their job from the beloved person fearing that the other will not be able to understand and accept the truth. In this way, they judge their neighbour in a similar fashion as society judges them.

To understand what is hiding behind the emptiness of the words, the two protagonists must perform a perceptive adjustment and start looking at - and listening to - the world in a new way. Although locked inside a metropolis which doesn’t give them any possibility of escape, in the ending they find a way to erect a virtual wall that protects them from the outside world and simultaneously allows them to see things from another point of view. At that point, anything that happens around them becomes irrelevant.

Turning a deaf ear and shutting down the world becomes an ersatz for a now-impossible escape from a world that has not even left them the capacity to dream of a better life. They regress to an ancestral stage of communication where the emptiness left by the words gives way to what silence has to say.

 

PRODUCTION NOTES

The movie was shot in Los Angeles in High Definition with the Sony Cinealta F900 and the P+S Technik Pro 35 adaptor for 35mm lenses.

The Sound of Silence is the reflection of my perception of an American metropolis. The choice to shoot in digital was dictated by the stylistic need of telling the story in long shots. The digital format allowed me to shoot a quantity of footage substantially larger than the film would have allowed me to.

                                                                            Andrea Bacci