Silence of the Author: Semantics of Muting in Cinema
The article analyses various forms and meanings of the director’s deliberate abandonment of sound and/or music both on screen and off screen. The absence of the soundtrack is defined in such terms as ‘reverberant silence’, ‘generating silence’, ‘intimate silence’, ‘inex-pressible stillness’, ‘after-sound silence’, ‘silence as absence’, which characterize the director’s aesthetic attitude towards the image.