Trainspotting

Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice

Silent right

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Straight to it: the moment of silence during last week’s Strictly Come Dancing was profoundly moving. It came in the same weekend as Remembrance Day and the one-minute silence there, but maybe silence is stronger for being a surprise.

Well, I say a surprise. The Strictly show did go to some lengths to belabour how the dance by Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice would include something for the deaf community. They did it enough that I thought about how odd it was that they were electing to spoil some moment.

But then little is done without a reason.

Ayling-Ellis and Pernice dance and it is remarkable, it’s peculiar how one pair moving to music works and another doesn’t, but this is a particularly strong performance –– and then that dance continued even as the music stopped for a time. Dances on this show are only 90 seconds long so I don’t really have the faintest idea how short this gap was, but it was a strong gap and I actually gasped.

Strictly is a shiny-floor show, and I am as unlikely to be moved by an air-once celebrity programme as I am a football match. So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise and when it’s in a surprising place.

The reason for spoiling how there would be some moment for the deaf community, though, was for the community of people whose first thought is to complain. Like the audiences for Contact who left their cinema seats to go ask the projectionist what the hell they thought they were doing, losing the sound half a minute into the movie.

So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise that you’ve been warned about. No, sod that. Those Contact audience people were just thick and there are always going to be thick people. The only thing I can’t be sure of is whether I’m one of them.

Strictly’s silence made me gasp. Contact’s opening sequence made me hold my breath. Both completely unconsciously.

Mind you, I think I may have held my breath a little during the first Mission: Impossible film when your man is hanging from a rope in that noise-detecting room thing.

And actually, now I think of it, it was the few frames of silence at the very start of Trainspotting that grabbed me.

Clearly, I like silence and must use it more in my writing. Starting with

Shut up

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It doesn’t always follow that every writer likes every piece of great writing but, come on, you can’t fail to love every brilliant second of Trainspotting’s script by John Hodge. Only, I was into that film, entirely and completely engrossed from the opening half a second.

And specifically the opening half a second where there isn’t a word. Isn’t a sound.

I know it’s only half a second, maybe 20 frames at most, but the silence is completely arresting. For that one fraction of a moment you’re seeing a street scene before feet come down out of the top of frame and Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life bursts in. Take a look:

Choose life, eh?

Then I suspect few people have ever compared Trainspotting to Gerry Anderson’s UFO, but here goes. Watch the famous title sequence and see what I’m seeing.

The far future of 1980. And the far past of camerawork focusing on a woman’s backside. Anyway. After the Century 21 Television sting, it’s silent for what seems like an age but is actually about a second.

It’s a punch. Maybe because it’s a little different from the usual, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think that silence is a hugely powerful punch.

I think silence can also make you hold your breath. There’s that recent horror film A Quiet Place where you have to shut up to survive, for instance. I’ll never know how effective it is because it’s horror and I’m a wimp. Then there’s a noisy thriller in cinemas right now – I don’t want to spoil it just to make one small point – but it features a single moment of silence and that made me jump.

Flashback 22 years to the first Mission: Impossible film. If you’ve seen it, you remember the very long silent scene as Tom Cruise steals a list from a PC in a CIA vault. Forget the hanging off buildings and aircraft he does in the later films, this silent scene is excruciatingly tense. I love it. If you’ve a little while, take a look at this short video analysing the scene and its production. I can’t show it to you unless I point out that its clips from the television version of Mission: Impossible are from the forgotten 1980s remake instead of the 1960s original, mind.

Also, this is a YouTube video so in the midst of interesting detail it gets childish for a moment or two. Silence would’ve been better.

I’m conscious that for a piece about shutting up, this week I’m showing you an awful lot of audio and video clips. But I think this is all using the same muscles you do in writing. I think video editing is like drafting. I definitely think a film is finally written in the edit suite.

Which means I am a fan of sound and film editor Walter Murch. He works on everything and talks about it too. Of the very, very many lectures of his you can find online, here’s an excerpt where he talks about silence. It’s about the effectiveness of it but does also cop to how sometimes sheer production frustration can create art.

I’ll shut up now. And get on with some writing.