> Overbearing soundtracks bug me especially in thrillers and horror movies; if you watch enough horror movies you can tell what's going to happen just by picking up on the musical cues. Hitchcock made "The Birds" without any sort of musical score and it stands as one of the best thrillers ever made. I've seen that movie half-a-dozen times and have never once wished there was some blaring music from off-camera.
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> Does anyone else have any particular favorite silent scenes in movies? Why? What is it that makes silence so effective?

Overbearing soundtracks in thrillers is one of my own pet peeves. I love soundtracks, and some of my favorite soundtracks are *from* thrillers, but there is a reflex tendency to overscore films. It's exactly the wrong thing to do.

Silence is creepy because that's what's creepy in real life. Even an inherently spooky sort of score, like the theme to Psycho or Jaws, which can terrify people just by listening to it, can be less scary than dead silence, because it's removed from reality. What scares us in real life? Maybe walking alone in the dark, when everything is dead quiet, and all you can hear is the clack-clack of footsteps and your own breathing.

All the most chilling uses of sound I can think of come from Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a genius at making use of sound, because he somehow had it both ways. He had a long-running partnership with composer Bernard Herrmann (much like Spielberg seems to have with John Williams). Herrmann's Hitchcock scores are some of the greatest the world of film has ever seen. But Hitch knew how not to over use the score. Some great Hitchcockian moments of silence:

1. My absolute favorite is from "Frenzy." A woman walks out of a bar and steps up to the curb. It's the middle of the day, and traffic is bustling, but the camera drifts in low, and all the sounds fade out to nothing. It's chilling, because it's such an *unnatural* silence. Right then and there, you know she's going to die. And I can't for the life of me figure out *how* this knowledge is conveyed, only that it is. The silence is broken with the cheerily-toned line "Got a place to stay?" (the staging is also brilliant), which remains among the creepiest lines I've ever heard in any movie. But it's not the line that makes it stand out in my mind but the period of incomparably eerie silence before it.

2. The most famous scene in "Torn Curtain" is one of the most uncomfortable fist fights ever filmed. Hitchcock's goal was to illustrate, contrary to so many movies that show guys getting knocked out with a punch, just how hard it is to take somebody out. Paul Newman does everything to dispatch of this one heavy, but the guy just keeps coming. But the violence is anything but glorified, as tends to be the case in such movies: it's brutal (without being gory) and winds up a kind of disconcerting tension. The whole scene is done without any kind of music score: all you hear are grunts and gasps and thumps from blunt instruments. No music would be appropriate, but many directors would have tried to fill the space anyhow.

3. The final scene of "The Birds," where the survivors of the attack wade through presently quiescent birds.

4. The Lady Vanishes. (Hitch's 1938 version, not the uninspired remake.) There are a few different moments in which silence is used effectively, but the one I most remember is an early scene with a woman in a train station. I actually don't remember what, in particular, was going on, and maybe that makes the point all the better. Because although I don't remember the specifics of the story at that particular moment, the haunting quietness is something I remember very well.

5. Rear Window. Jimmy Stewart, helpless to assist, watches Grace Kelly get attacked in the apartment complex across the way. True to reality, there are practically no sounds: once in a while you can hear the ever-so faint sounds coming from across the way, but otherwise all you get is Jimmy Stewart's panicking.

6. Blackmail. A woman witnesses a murder, and it's traumatizing her. At dinner, all conversation fades from her attention -- signified by its fading from the soundtrack as well -- except for the word "knife," which, when spoken in perfectly innocent contexts, comes through loud and clear.

7. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955 version). There's a footsteps-only hand-held shot, taken from Jimmy Stewart's perspective, as he walks down a sidewalk. Another moment I don't remember the context for but which was effective enough that the emotions and tension burned itself into my memory.

It's interesting that it's all Hitchcock that I think of when talking about silence in films. Other directors (like Fritz Lang) were good if not ingenius at using silence judiciously, but I honestly don't think any other director used it so perfectly so *much*.

Still, a couple great moments from other directors spring to mind:

1. "2001." Like you, I'm not a big 2001 fan at all. I think it's a great work of art that is, essentially, a fundamental failure. Even so, there is no denying that the scene you speak of, where Dave and HAL have their showdown, is one of the greatest scenes ever put on film, and the soundtrack is entirely to credit. By the time Dave is walking around on Jupiter, the breathing-only soundtrack is way, way old and irritating, but the stuff with HAL is as good as film gets.

2. "Oliver!" It's interesting that a *musical* should have great moments in silence, but it has two. The director was Carol Reed, remembered most for The Third Man (which, frankly, could have benefited from less soundtrack) but otherwise underappreciated. Both scenes involve one of the creepiest movie villains ever, Bill Sykes as played by Oliver Reed. In his first scene, he almost has no lines at all: it isn't until the scene is over and he disappears into the fog that he snaps his dog's name to call him to his side. Fagin (Ron Moody) has all the lines: he fawns over the preciousness of stolen loot as Sykes wordlessly pulls item after item from his person and dumps it into a sack. The look in his face...pure menace. The second scene involves Sykes taking Oliver Twist out on a burglary. The soundtrack is deathly quiet, just as it would be eerily silent in real life. Every sound that does intrude is a great discomfort, because it might wake the residents.

Today, silence is misunderstood to be something that's empty. Sometimes I see a thriller with a blaring orchestrated score or, worse, some pounding heavy metal theme, and I try to imagine how much more effective the whole thing would be if it were dead quiet. I'm going to pick on a cult classic: I was not impressed with "Halloween," and I think the much-prized soundtrack is most of the reason why. It's a good soundtrack, but it's just so overplayed. The suspense in scene after scene is dampened by the music butting in exactly when it shouldn't. John Carpenter should have paid more attention to its predecessor, "Psycho," another serial killer film with a classic score. Hitchcock didn't have those infamous violins rasping through the WHOLE THING. No, when people were creeping around the house, wondering what was around the corner or behind a door, there wasn't any music at all. (Add another to the list of great silences in Hitchcock films.) But Carpenter takes that one little theme and plays it and plays it and plays it and plays it. The creepiest moment of "Halloween"? The one time the score shuts the heck up, and Michael Myers stands in a doorway with a sheet over his head. (Of course, the glasses on the sheet look so goofy that it practically derails it anyway, but at least this moment gets close.)

(A tangential thought: does the ineffectivity of the Halloween score (which, again, by itself I think is good) have anything to do with how *full* it is? By contrast, is the Jaws score so infamously creepy because there is so much silence *within* it? All it takes is the first two notes of the Jaws theme to start creeping people out.)

Even my favorite directors of today have a tendency to lapse into allowing overplayed soundtracks. Not all do, of course. Robert Zemeckis is to be commended for his sparse use of sound and music in "Cast Away," for example: the best 45 minutes of that movie have essentially no dialogue and little music. But I don't think I can call the use of silence in Cast Away "ingenius"; merely, "correct." The only contemporary director I can particularly think of that is so *consistently* brilliant with silence is M. Night Shyamalan, who built memorable scene after memorable scene in "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" with very little sound at all.

In the age of Armageddon and Moulin Rouge (DID I just put those two movies in the same sentence??) is silence becoming a lost art?

S "'You can't buy silence -- you can only rent it.' -- Zero Effect" am