A Kind of Hush: Experimental Works

Film - Short | February 3 | 5 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Barry Spinello in person. Experimental filmmakers engage silence in a variety of ways in this collection of shorts. Includes Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Stan Brakhage’s The Riddle of the Lumen, Nathaniel Dorsky’s Threnody, Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film, Steve Roden’s four words for four hands, and Barry Spinello’s Soundtrack. (85 mins)

Presented in conjunction with our series The Sounds of Silence

John Cage famously asserted that there is no such thing as silence or empty space: “There is always something to see, something to hear.” Inspired by Cage’s 1952 noise-cancelling composition 4’33”, the exhibition Silence considers the absence of sound as both subject and medium in modern and contemporary art and film. With a tranquil array of painting, sculpture, and installation from the past one hundred years, Silence fills the galleries with a critically conceived quiet. But what of silence and the moving image? In the absence of intentional film sound, silence can become a reasoned but imperfect lack, expressing timbres at once aesthetic, revelatory, and sensorial. The Sounds of Silence concerns itself not with so-called silent cinema, but with different variants of quiet, from the hushed absolute of no-sound to a more muted mise-en-scène. The program A Kind of Hush comprises representative silent works from the avant-garde. Such practitioners as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Nathaniel Dorsky weigh in as advocates of differing quietudes. The avant-garde surfaces again but in full sonority with Sourcing Sound, a compilation of works by such artists as Stephen Vitiello, Rudy Lemcke, Robert Russett, and Semiconductor in which sound and image are initiated often from a single motivating source. Silence as a more cultural construct surfaces in several feature films: Bergman’s masterful The Silence describes the terrible quiet left behind by God’s absence, Pat Collins’s wind-swept Silence follows an audio recordist as he reconnects with the source of sound, and Philip Gröning’s reverential Into Great Silence closely portrays the muted days of an alpine monastery of silent monks. Philosophical, fundamental, or just faint, silence is beauty in the ear of the beholder.

Tickets required: $9.50 Adults,  $5.50 BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley Students,  $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty, non UCB students, seniors, youth, and disabled

Ticket info: Buy tickets online.

Event Contact: bampfa@berkeley.edu