In Welsh, the etymological root of the word for listening, gwrando, is tangled up with daw or dawelwch, meaning silence. Silence, in this sense, is not a passive thing or an absence, but an opening up of the opportunity to listen, to tune in to what is left when intentional sound is removed. John Cage’s 4’33’’ remains the most famous example of an artist playing with this tension. “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time” Cage wrote in his lectures on the subject of silence, “In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”
Walkie Talkie, a day of talks and screenings of silent artists’ films hosted by studioMADE in Denbigh, North Wales, took this relationship between silence and listening as its theme. Since the 1920s, when technological advancements brought about the end of the era of silent movies, the use of silence, or rather the deliberate removal of intentional sound, has been an artistic choice at filmmakers’ disposal. Walkie Talkie brought together artists from the LUX g39- Wales Critical Forum, a monthly discussion group for artists who work with the moving image in Wales, to consider what is gained when intentional sound is stripped away from the moving image.
The impetus for pursuing this theme was as much practical as it was conceptual. The day of talks came at the end of a weeklong series of ‘twilight screenings’ at studioMADE. studioMADE is a cross-disciplinary studio and gallery founded by artists Angela Davies and Mark Eaglen in 2016 and located in a beautiful, historic Carriageworks building on a small winding road in the Welsh market town. For Walkie Talkie, the ground floor paned glass windows were turned into a screen showing films submitted by artists from the LUX Wales Critical Forum. Shown in this way, the films were bisected by the wooden panes of the historic windows, shorn of the capacity to deliver accompanying sound, and backed by the ambient sounds of the quiet Welsh street (when I visited, the faint patter of rain and the chatter of others gathered on the pavement to watch). Walkie Talkie made a virtue of this constraint – or rather, this opportunity to tune into what the leaflet called “the potency of silence.”
The programme of films showed the diversity of possible silences within artists’ film. Two different versions of silence were expressed in the films of Carol Breen and Lauren Heckler, or rather, their films tuned in to the different social resonances of the removal of sound. Breen’s desktop choreography, ‘Still ‘On’ Line’ (2024) featured layers of the familiar, mundane, and repetitive actions that characterise our engagement with computer screens – opening and closing of documents, clicking, minimising, moving, and playing. The artist uses the repeated motif of a blue triangle, an artefact from video feedback, to emphasise the absurdity of repetition and conformity in our screen time. Removing the click of the mouse and the scuttle of the keyboard absents the human from the interaction, leaving only the curiously flat affect of the screen. Here, silence is clinical, inhuman.
The silence of Heckler’s film ‘The Sugar Den’ (2023), made while the artist was in residence at studioMADE, is of a different character altogether. Heckler’s is a silence of defiance, a claiming of privacy or of control over how one is seen. The 16-minute film shows two protagonists (Liberty Chapman and the artist) sitting on the front step of a disused shop: the titular Sugar Den. The pair chat, eat apples and strawberry laces, track their sugar intake on their phones and use insulin pens. Both have Type 1 Diabetes. We do not hear their conversation – our inquisitiveness kicks us sharply – nor do we hear the sounds of passing cars and street life. Instead, the artist layers over the footage a written text with deliberately slow phrasing: “Despite all odds/ here they are/ sitting in the porch.” The text is characterful and at turns philosophical, giving an insight into what passes between the pair alongside information on their condition and what it means to live with it. It is a deeply personal film, holding its audience at a remove from its intimate core. Picking up on this in a Q and A session, experimental film scholar Kim Knowles highlighted the social stakes of filmmaking in general: who gets to talk for whom?
Not all of the films on show were designed to be silent. Zillah Bowes’ ‘Allowed’ (2021), for example, is a short 4-minute film in which Bowes has animated her photographs of wild urban growth in Cardiff. The green lives that are usually dismissed as weeds are here centre stage, blooming through the cracks in concrete, waving eerily in a digitally animated breeze. Usually, the film is shown with a poetic voiceover layered over diegetic sounds – indeed the artist, both filmmaker and poet, describes it as “lyrical.” It was only as a function of Walkie Talkie that ‘Allowed’ was screened silent. This changes the complexion of the silence; the removed words felt, in this case, a heavily significant other. Commenting on the silent version, Bowes noted that the pacing of the film felt different without the words. The cuts mirror the lyrical flow of the piece, and without this flow the cuts felt more brutal, the scenes too brief. The silence, in other words, needed more space than words.
The Walkie Talkie day of screenings took place in Theatr Twm o’r Nant, a community theatre in a somewhat neo-classical style building, just down the street from studioMADE. The theatre-turned-cinema itself had a faded glory about it – red seats, thick curtains – which chimed with the Hollywood-inflected ‘Talkie’ of the events’ title. The physicality of film was keenly felt in Laura Philips’ film ‘Brawdy,’ shown here digitally but which was originally made on solarised 16mm film. ‘Brawdy’ takes as its subject Welsh anti-nuclear protests, and the sun-drenched overexposure of the footage make radiation a matter of both form and content. Philips never screens the same film twice, setting up a compact with the audience, who provide the live ambient soundtrack, which edges closer to that of live performance. During the panel discussion Philips spoke to John Cage’s tradition of silence: “There is always sound in the room,” she said, “and bodies in the room.”
With this, Philips captured something unique about the Walkie Talkie programme. It offered a rare opportunity to watch artists’ film in a cinema setting. Unlike in the window ‘twilight’ screenings, the removal or lack of filmic sound made the silent social convention of the cinema space feel almost church-like, quasi-reverent. The silence of the cinema – or rather, the amplification of shuffles and sniffles – has an agency. It pulls its audience into a heightened sense of collectivity and attention. The effectiveness, or at least the curiosity, of this was in its opposition to the curation of moving image in the gallery, where soundbleed is common and it often proves difficult to balance the needs of a time-based medium with the freedom of an audience to move through an exhibition space.
Closing out the day was Guy Sherwin’s performance of ‘Man with Mirror’ (1976-ongoing). Sherwin is an eminent experimental filmmaker with roots in the London Filmmakers Co-Op (a forebearer of LUX, who sponsored this event). For ‘Man with Mirror’ Sherwin stands in the beam of the reel-to-reel projector, expertly operated by Laura Philips, holding a screen which is white on one side and mirrored on the other. Sherwin uses the screen to catch the projection of his fifty-years-younger self holding up a matching screen. Both versions of the artist – flesh and light – twist and flip the screen, sending the image around the walls of Theatr Twm o’r Nant, directing the bright light of the projector into the eyes of the audience, and blurring the line between now and then, here and there, on screen and off. The performance was mesmerically moving; filling in the silence of the piece, along with the whir of the projector, was decades of life lived. The performance provided a soft landing for the day.
In light of the programme of Walkie Talkie, the doyen of artistic silence John Cage’s comment that “try as we may to make a silence, we cannot” takes on a different meaning. The artists of Walkie Talkie make, in fact, many silences. Just as sound is relational, so is silence. It links itself to different currents of meaning and significance. The silence of Breen’s film was not the same as Hecklers’, nor was Philips’ the same as Sherwin’s or any other artist on the programme (Séan Vicary, Catherine Wynne-Paton, Kerry Baldry, Paul Eastwood) – even if they all played out in the same ambient aural context. Cage’s legacy is to sensitise us to the ambient sounds in spaces of silence. Films, however, shape silences against themselves while leaving imaginative space open for the audience. The silence, or dawelwch, of Walkie Talkie was indeed ‘potent’, and made for rich and varied listening.
Walkie Talkie took place at studioMADE between Jan 27 – Feb 3, 2024.
Laura Harris is a sociologist and writer based in Liverpool.
This review is supported by studioMADE.
Published 03.03.2024 by Natalie Hughes in Reviews
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