Short Films Without Words
Short films without words
26th, April 2007
Just as there are noises that do not need silences, and silences that do not wish to be broken by words, there are words that eat other words until the stories themselves are swallowed and disappear. Present in their very inexistence, the words are gulped down in order to give the lead to images and a soundtrack capable of transmitting sensations, emotions, and feelings as immediate as they are universal.At times like an intuition, short films without words show off the power of film language by providing meanings and meaningful represented images, organic sounds and suggestive music. A universe of sound that gives a dramatic sense to the events, at times with rhetorical simplicity, at others without it. For this reason, the perception between the diegetic and the non-diegetic, the synchronized and the synchrony, or the corporeal and the aesthetic are useful in putting all the accents on these non-existent words, which now lie at rest in the stomach of the story itself. The ringing of a bicycle bell, the mooing of a cow, a book thrown upon the floor, a door opening and closing, or the raucous strumming of a guitar chord thus become fundamental elements in a new, more physical and sensory dialogue.
From Celuvkata’s great concentration of a love story into close up shots, to the pure musicality of Le moine et le poisson, short films without words also take on narrative fluidity in the entertaining animated film Parking and the plotline of the balloon rebellion in Billy's Balloon. They are disparate stories related in a way to the most emotional and intellectual perception in We Are Winning Don’t Forget and with the more hypnotic and sentient Nogo. In each of them, the sounds and music are perfect compliments for shots that fill up and empty themselves of time, that speak sarcastically and ridicule, shots ready to offer us bursts of laughter, reflections, or measured music.
Such different short films as Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers or Plassmangel are the result of narrative experiences that mark their own rhythm, their own pace. Everyday sounds are turned into symphonies from contemporary life, into odes to the small and big noises that are left unarticulated individually, to be transformed into the perfect company for concise images and solvent editing.
Which is why in many short films without words, we hear what we did not appreciate before, and we see what before we only watched. A new stance that makes us active spectators of the films whose words have been bitten off and swallowed, words with a lot to say.
Laura García Pousa
Screenwriter and film critic