education around silence_

To begin with: absence is always presence.

The spectator notices it and it is one of the few times that the fourth wall is broken. Absence is rarely used. We try to break the fourth wall with the gaze of the actress or as Ingmar Bergman and Luis López Carrasco did in the film “El Futuro”, but when there is an absence of sound, which is similar, we surrender to power of the visual that has been perverting us for 70 years -sound is 60% of the audiovisual ensemble-.There is a moment in which everybody forgets this resource and it is difficult for them to use silence as a tool.

The absence of sound has not been explored enough because it generates a vacuum, a lack of leadership that terrifies the viewer and also the cinematographer. This fear stems from a lack of sound education. Perhaps the spectator’s fear of encountering these sound absences is less than that of the filmmaker who faces mainstream formulas that do not allow silence, that do not allow the absence of sound content.

It is a pity because it is precisely this sound void that makes the spectator break the fourth wall and integrate into the film the ambient sounds of the cinema itself or his own breathing.

Even in silent films live music was used to emphasize, to unify.

Experimental cinema works with a wider view and the spectator has a more participatory experience with the work.

Perhaps the dictatorship of sound over image will come in 150 years, when we will all be blind.

In my profession as an editor I often encounter some processes that involve the absence of sound, for example at the beginning of my career when I received the Daylies (freshly shot footage that is sent to the editor during the shooting) of the film in question, I received them without sound. The brain behaved differently because it was less contaminated.

It is obviously necessary and essential for editing to have access to sound, but the question is, what happens when there is no sound... your perception is broadened, you see things you would not otherwise see and this opens up new creative paths.

The void in film editing could be the absence of emotion.When you take it away from the viewer, he becomes disoriented and has to participate in the film with his own emotions. This is not easy... once again for a question of education.