Word: silents
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...currently on its way to becoming a recognized non-profit. Other recent antics held by the group included its Caroling Choir, which performed Christmas parodies such as “Silent (But Deadly) Night...
...With Stellet Licht (Silent Light), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007 and opened Jan. 7 at New York City's Film Forum, Reygadas shocks again: this drama of a Mennonite community in northern Mexico contains no explicit hanky-panky. In its way, the film is true to the severe, austere code of the Mennonites. Yet it is shot with such care and creativity that each scene has a visual, emotional luster. One critic jokingly called Silent Light the best film ever made in its language - an easy claim to fame, since it is probably the only film...
...Reygadas sets Silent Light's agenda in the first moments. The film opens with a nearly five-minute time-lapse shot of night sky, stars, dawn slowly breaking and finally full daylight, as the sound track comes alive with loud crickets, braying and mooing, and breathy, muffled screams. Brilliant sunshine bathes the kitchen of a Mennonite farm as the family takes morning prayer in a silence broken only by the loud ticking of a clock. Esther (Miriam Toews), the mother, raises her eyes; Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), the father, says, "Amen"; and the children dive wordlessly into their cereal. After...
...Reygadas dramatizes this with small, telling gestures in long-take shots of the countryside, using the wide screen to place the land's natural beauty against the internal conflicts of the three main participants. The director also constructs elaborate pairs of sequences, one toward the beginning of Silent Light, the other toward the end. The opening dawn is the prelude to the closing dusk (which consumes the film's last five minutes); a church service precedes a wake; a passionate kiss of love is followed by the restorative kiss of life...
...restrictive as Mennonite edicts. Pare down movie technique to its essentials; show characters behaving, however mutely, rather than acting; make viewers work for their epiphanies. This style has been responsible for many small, lugubrious films and - from directors who know how to make more of less - a few masterpieces. Silent Light is one of them...