Quiet Pictures: Women and Silence in Contemporary British and French Cinema

Quiet Pictures approaches the films of Joanna Hogg, Lynne Ramsay, Céline Sciamma, and Lucile Hadzhalilovicthrough the lens of silence as a motif and texture.

This book takes up the question of different uses of silence in the work of these directors and how this creates a space for foregrounding innovative practices that establish new ways of looking, staring, and gazing. Sarah Artt discusses how the deliberate deployment of silence creates space for the formation of reciprocal gazes that counteract the typically gendered and binary ways in which women and femme-presenting people tend to be portrayed on screen. Quiet Pictures draws on the political legacy of feminist film theory to explore and conceptualise what it means to not just look back, but to share the gaze.

This book discusses several films, including: Unrelated(Hogg, 2007), Archipelago(Hogg, 2010), Exhibition(Hogg, 2013), The Souvenir Part I and II(Hogg, 2019 and 2021), Morvern Callar(Ramsay, 2002), We Need to Talk About Kevin(Ramsay, 2011), Innocence(Hadzhalilovic 2004), Evolution(Hadzhalilovic 2015), Waterlilies/Naissance des Pieuvres(Sciamma, 2007), Tomboy(Sciamma, 2011), Girlhood/Bande des Filles(Sciamma, 2014), Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Portrait d’une jeune fille en feu(Sciamma, 2019), and Petite Maman/Little Mother(Sciamma, 2021).

Sarah Artt is Lecturer in English and Film at Edinburgh Napier University, UK. Her research interests include screen adaptations, silence in the cinema, and the representation of women in public. Her work has appeared in Scope, In Media Res, and multiple edited collections.