Creating Silence in the Soundtrack and the Aesthetics of the Film: Academic Principles

Studying silence as a dramaturgically important element of a film is an important aspect in VGIK’s curriculum. The instructors don’t only introduce the student sound designers to the technique of its creating, but devote enough time to the artistic aspect of the phenomenon of silence, offering them to comprehend it on their own, by way of expanding their knowledge about the time, space and circumstances of its intended on-screen representation. The educational process includes studying different film-scholar, philosophical and aesthetic views on the phenomenon of silence and, accordingly, a multi-angle approach to the formation of ‘quiet spots’ in the soundtrack of a motion picture. In class, the students create sound sketches, come up with dramatic situations that create the possibility of silence and analyze the films containing ‘quiet scenes.’ Such tasks prepare the student to perceiving and creating silence as an artistic and semantic image of a quiet episode by means of music and ambient noises, in the dynamic flow of sound. Modern technologies, taught at VGIK’s Sound Design Department, enable the students to render silence in different ways, taking into account the dramatic context of a particular movie and the director’s aesthetic concept. However, the hands-on mastery of techniques and various technologies is inextricably linked with the mastering of aesthetic parameters and criteria of sound designs created by the students, including those related to the formation of «quiet places» in a film. In conclusion, the authors summarize the basic approaches and principles of creating silent spots in the film’s soundtrack, practiced by the instructors and passed on to the students in the process of performing class assignments.