.png)
Here at Krotos, we’re obsessed with sound, but even we should know when silence works best. In film, the moments where silence is called for can be obvious: a quiet moment between old lovers, a morning in a remote location, a character falling peacefully asleep. But what about when silence is less expected, and used as a conscious choice by the sound designer? Silent moments can be used to punctuate the cacophony; otherwise, loudness can lose its impact as it turns into information overload.
Take the battle of Helms Deep from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (below). If you were to hear every weapon collision, horse gallop, yell, stab, and scream, it would sound like nothing after a few minutes. Your ears would fatigue, and your attention wouldn’t be drawn into every moment the director is trying to highlight. In the film, strategic moments of silence are used to draw you in and reduce the battle down to the bare sonic components necessary for each shot.
In this article, we’ll break down some sequences we consider to be key examples in using silence to elevate a scene. Exploring why they work and how they impact the viewer.
If you’re on the lookout for some sounds to break up your own loud moments with relative silence, Check out our selection of Free Sound Effects. If you get a kick out of our movie rankings, how about our list of the most iconic movie battle and fight scenes.
A malicious AI terminates a crewmate in the void of space.
You rarely get true moments of silence in cinema, especially ones which are diegetic rather than portraying a character's emotional state; this is because there are few environments on earth where there is no sound whatsoever. Short of an anechoic chamber or a high-end recording studio, even the stillest desert or emptiest building will contain atmospheric ambient sounds. This leads to a lot of quiet moments in film retaining sounds such as breathing or wind to prevent unnatural silence.
But in space, there is no sound. In 2001, Kubrick uses true diegetic silence to portray the horror of the endless void. Moving from the uncomfortable coldness of the ship's internal noise and the crew's laboured breaths, to the unfeeling stillness of space as we watch Dr Frank fight against the inevitable. There’s nothing that can be done, and the silence heightens that more than any screams or spacesuit foley ever could.
Three people try to share a minute of silence.
As previously mentioned, true silence is more likely to be used in non-diegetic moments: A dream sequence, a character's subjective POV, something that's emotive and surreal enough visually that the silence brings attention to itself. The helicopter crash in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004) springs to mind as an example of this. These moments of silence bring the post-production of the movie to attention, like the rug has been pulled away by the movie's orchestrator, shattering the illusion of reality for cinematic effect.
Godard, in contrast to the above example, uses silence for the sake of the jarring effect it has on its own, with no flashy cuts or imagery to frame it differently. A character proposes a minute's silence, then after 3, 2, 1, the atmosphere of the cafe is unnaturally taken away. We are left in this unnatural, uncomfortable feeling, caused, and seemingly sustained, by the characters, until the bubble is popped by the very character that suggested it, bringing the atmosphere back so we can breathe again. An example of meta filmmaking at its finest.
An iconic sound effect punctuated by the perfect use of silence.
In stark contrast to the two previous arthouse films of yesteryear, we jump to a critically panned blockbuster of recent memory, with 62% on Rotten Tomatoes. You might not have expected a film like this to appear here, but if you look past the clunky dialogue and cheese, you will find the industry's best and brightest minds behind the scenes: in this case, Ben Burtt and his incredible team at Skywalker Ranch.
Unlike Kubrick’s depiction of space, in Star Wars, there is sound: you hear the starfighters whizz past, you feel the sonic weight of a star destroyer; this has been established from the first shot of the first film. In a franchise full of so many iconic sounds, the seismic charges from Episode II are up there with the lightsaber. But in this particular scene, the usual symphony of laser fire and spaceship engines is violently taken away. A deafening silence before a deafening explosion makes an already fantastic sound not only hit harder, but remain in our minds long after the film itself has faded.
A moment of stillness before a seminal cinematic beatdown.
A return to the non-diegetic, this time in the hands of another master, Martin Scorsese. Where the internal is represented by washes of reverberated tones and processed atmospheres in this key scene from Raging Bull. Moments like this can act like a breather for the audience. The ground falls away, realism becomes surrealism, and you’re interacting with the narrative through the subjective emotion of the characters rather than the literal account of what's happening. The subtext becomes the text, only for a moment, before the real world takes over again.
In this case, a man begging for a beating, if only to show how much he can take. The sounds of the crowd die away as time slows, and we are left with only soft breaths and a metallic ambience. We are locked into the moment between the characters, like how time slows before a car accident. Before we are violently brought back to reality by the first punch. A moment of silence during a flurry of extreme violence. This scene might work without this sequence; the beatdown would still be harrowing. But we would have lost an unsayable thing, a moment that can be interpreted differently by everyone.
The Mount Olympus of war sequences, a true masterclass in loud and quiet.
A similar use of silence to the previous example, with another American master at the helm. It’s interesting how the D-Day beach landing scene is regarded as such a realistic portrayal of war, despite the amount of surrealism that occurs during its most iconic segments. It can be easy to think realism means reality, but reality is subjective, and is entirely based on whose perspective you’re in.
In the case of Saving Private Ryan, you experience the skirmish as not only the main character, but also as if you’re amongst the soldiers yourself. Of course, we have the harrowing and iconic shellshock sequence, where, like in Raging Bull, the surroundings give way to a droning atmosphere. Explosions and bullet impacts are still there, but they are distant. We’re in the character's mind, stunned and completely overwhelmed at what’s happening.
We also have the incredible use of diegetic silence with the underwater sections, where the bullets sound almost delicate as they maim and kill. The camera is our POV, momentarily escaping the cacophony as it dips under the water, and desperately makes its way towards the beach. Spielberg’s use of both the real and surreal throughout the sequence is to maximum effect, which is why it still stands as the best example of warfare in cinema.
The loudest example of silence in a genre-defining movie opening.
This entry feels like a culmination of all the previously mentioned techniques, and it’s all contained within the first thirty seconds of the film. One of the most iconic pages in Manga adapted into one of the most iconic openings to an animated movie. Akira’s beginning shows how opposites can be used for great effect: in this case, deafening silence instead of deafening loudness. The city's soundscape begins as just wind, like that of a desert wasteland. Before it is erased by the growing void, dying away to complete silence as the frame becomes pure white.
The sequence wouldn’t be improved with a hard-hitting explosion. Just like the moment of silence before the explosion in Attack of the Clones, but more. It sums up the tragedy of what’s being depicted, while remaining respectful to its obvious parallels to the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The loudest silence in cinema.