Widescreen

No one seems to have commented on this, but there have been too many of them not to notice: the great films of late summer and early autumn this year have been almost speechless. Literally. They have little or no dialogue.
We have had Vendredi Soir from Claire Denis, the French director renowned for her sensual wordless scenes. It is about a woman daydreaming in a Paris traffic jam, picking up a man and having sex with him. It has the odd sentence, but nothing of consequence. The animated feature Belleville Rendez-Vous, an instant classic, has a few mumbles and some radio commentary, but the characters say not a word to each other. Matthew Barney's majestic three-hour centrepiece to his Cremaster cycle - involving the building and destruction of the Chrysler building, scenes of masonic ritual, the legless Aimee Mullins, bagpipes symbolising the creative cycle and the transformation of the Guggenheim in New York-features about three lines of dialogue. And Jean-Pierre Melville's reissued 1970 heist film Le Cercle Rouge has perhaps ten pages of dialogue; most films of its length would run to 150 pages.
These films are too diverse to suggest a change in the zeitgeist, or a meaningful trend in the way cinema is being conceived by filmmakers. But four of them in a row, each deriving its power from the fact that its characters are almost mute, is a coincidence worth noting.
As the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer observed, "the picture, far, far more than the spoken word, penetrates deeply into the spectator's consciousness." Within minutes of looking at the face of Valerie Lemercier in Denis's film, we are in that daydream with her. If she had spoken, we would have become snagged on elements of her consciousness; but her aphonia allows us to drift deeper. A technique used by some film editors helps explain this. Before David Lean became a director, he was a celebrated cutter of films such as Pygmalion and work by Powell and Pressburger. His approach was to learn the dialogue of a scene by heart so that he could then switch the sound off and cut purely visually, hearing the words in his head but attending primarily to the rhythm of gestures and camera. In this way he was able to discover a deeper sense of movement in a scene than the surface talk suggested.
And in the films Lean was dealing with, the dialogue was rather good. This has not usually been the case. As Dreyer again put it, "words gushed forth from the empty faces" of actors in western sound cinema, and we were left with no underscore whatsoever. Like Vendredi Soir, Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 is pure underscore. It plays as if its conscious surface has been stripped off, exposing a vivid work of unconscious forces composed of base notes. Though Barney is a visual artist who has strayed into the movies, his film is sufficiently powerful for its lack of dialogue to act like a manifesto for mute cinema.
Not that there haven't been such rallying cries before. The German director Wim Wenders insisted that "screenplay is the vampire which sucks life from the film." His own commentary-heavy documentaries of the 1990s splendidly demonstrated his point. Bernardo Bertolucci's undervalued The Sheltering Sky achieves greatness in an extended mute sequence where Debra Winger's character loses herself - a kind of daydream, again - after her husband, played by John Malkovich, dies. Bertolucci here demonstrated with bravura the connection between silence and high cinema. The reissued Le Cercle Rouge is itself a homage to a famous case of extended cinematic muteness. One of the most talked-about sequences in French film is a 25-minute silent robbery of a jewellery store in Jules Dassin's 1955 film Rififi. Watching this today is still a gripping experience. You can hear your own heart beat. Le Cercle Rouge is the best of its many imitators. It too features a hit on a jewellery store. The sequence is again silent, except for two words. And it is more than a coincidence that the procedure also takes 25 minutes.
Such lessons about the psychological and narrative power of visual cinema are scattered throughout film history, yet one national film culture has been noticeably reluctant to learn them. Two of these great speechless works which are playing at the moment are French, one is Franco-Canadian and the fourth is American. By contrast, British cinema has in general skated on the surface of the well-made screenplay rather than dug into film's deeper terrains. There have been exceptions, of course. English director Nic Roeg's Australia-set Walkabout had a 15-page screenplay, and features long wordless sequences in the outback. Alan Clarke's Northern Ireland-set Elephant for the BBC made a point of having almost no dialogue whatsoever. And The Sheltering Sky was produced by Britain's Recorded Picture company.
But more films made on these islands should learn the lesson of Dassin, Melville, Roeg, Clarke, Denis, Bertolucci, and Barney. Isn't it time for producers to stop flying off to Euro-funded courses on screenplay analysis and the three-act structure and concentrate instead on more filmic approaches?
The film industry's public sector body, the UK film council, should announce a scheme to fund films without words.