Monday, July 22, 2013

Enjoy the silence?

posted Jan 23, 2012, 3:01 PM by Corey Jean Jones
A silent film in the 21st century is winning awards. The Artist is, to me, the most sagacious commentary on modern society since Fight Club. In my yoga classes, I talk about stripping away the outside noise and the internal chatter. I encourage people to unplug. That being said, I could barely sit through this silent film. I was losing my damn mind! The plot creeps along at the pace of the original films of the silent era. Nothing explodes, no one has sex, and it is in black and flipping white! For my Facebooking while texting and watching t.v. generation this was painful. Sure, the intellectual part of my mind was thinking, "This is great! A moment of silence in this crazy world.".

However, was I enjoying the silence or enduring the silence? 
Um, the latter I think. I do not have all the modern bells and whistles that some possess...ipads, iphones, ipants? But, I am definitely still a part of the technology tornado of contemporary life. 

The Artist plays with the audience so that you are constantly waiting for a voice to emerge from the silently moving lips. I found myself begging for the words to become audible but they remained a few words of text on a black screen. And yet, in my daily life, I communicate with everyone in the form of text. No voices to be heard from the people I care about. Is everyone begging to be heard and no one is listening? Are we really communicating? Without the benefit of facial expressions, tonal inflection, or even the silent film's triumphant music, what are we really saying? The juxtaposition of a movie without talking in the loud, overly stimulating world we are used to...well, it blows my mind. 

So, this yoga teacher will spend a teensy bit less time online and more time enjoying the silence.

No comments:

Post a Comment