{"id":1876,"date":"2018-08-10T08:58:22","date_gmt":"2018-08-10T08:58:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/?p=1876"},"modified":"2018-08-10T08:58:22","modified_gmt":"2018-08-10T08:58:22","slug":"the-silence-of-silents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2018\/08\/10\/the-silence-of-silents\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silence of Silents"},"content":{"rendered":"

Previously on Self Distract\u2026 I\u2019m a writer and I talk too much but still I wanted to persuade<\/a> you that shutting up is a good thing. I believe you looked at me like that. But what was on my mind was how effective silence is in drama and Heide Goody<\/a> pointed out that there were these entire wordless feature films that I\u2019d forgotten.<\/p>\n

She mentioned Buster Keaton and his silent movies are amazing.<\/p>\n

Yet even as I was nodding in agreement and even as I was thinking she\u2019s dead right and I should\u2019ve thought of the silents before, I was also thinking about this.<\/p>\n

There are silent films that didn\u2019t need to be silent.<\/p>\n

I mean movies and TV that deliberately chose to be silent for effect rather than because they simply didn\u2019t have microphones.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to remember the name of a television drama, some kind of military thing, where it went silent for one episode for no reason. Well, no drama reason. No story reason. I imagine it was several years into the run and the production team were bored.<\/p>\n

Instead of characters speaking to one another, you had them pointing and gesturing like they were in a clothes catalogue. In every other episode the characters were played at least as if they intended to look believable but here they were amdram and if any had a moustache, you expected toiling.<\/p>\n

Was it called Commando? Something like that. I can\u2019t find it and I\u2019m not one hundred percent unhappy about that.<\/p>\n

Whereas I have found and will watch again one episode of The Prisoner.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s perhaps my favourite episode, Many Happy Returns by Anthony Skene, and for all sorts of reasons but one is that nobody speaks for about the first 20 minutes \u2013 and it is superb.<\/p>\n

The silence is so well done that you don\u2019t realise it\u2019s silent. It\u2019s so much a part of the story \u2013\u00a0Number 6 (Patrick McGoohan) wakes up to find the Village is deserted \u2013 that it\u2019s natural. He doesn\u2019t speak because there\u2019s nobody to speak to.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s so obvious that you don\u2019t think about it at all, you don\u2019t think about how unusual this is for television drama. And then when you do hear speech it is a huge jolt.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s using silence for drama.<\/p>\n

Do you know, I just looked up who wrote it and found that the script has been published. What\u2019s more, I\u2019ve got the book it\u2019s published in. Right, that\u2019s going to be my 421st script read of the year.<\/p>\n

That book is The Prisoner: The Original Scripts \u2013 Volume 1<\/a> and Many Happy Returns is on Blu ray shiny disc<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Previously on Self Distract\u2026 I\u2019m a writer and I talk too much but still I wanted to persuade you that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1877,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[1391,215,208,863,1390,197,1380,1388,602,1389,180],"class_list":["post-1876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-selfdistract","tag-anthony-skene","tag-drama","tag-film","tag-heide-goody","tag-many-happy-returns","tag-scripts","tag-silence","tag-silent","tag-television","tag-the-prisoner","tag-writing","has-featured-image"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/08\/The-Prisoner-Many-Happy-Returns.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-ug","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1876"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1881,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876\/revisions\/1881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}