The Shell-Shocked Silents: Langdon, Repetition-Compulsion and the First World War

Abstract

In many ways the idea of a silent war film seems no less absurd than the idea of a silent musical or soundless opera (though these too paradoxically exist), a kind of oxymoronic curiosity destined to be confined to the most obscure corner of film history. After all, surely any attempt to authentically represent the experience of modern warfare — the shelling, the gunfire, its terrifying suddenness and explosive power — has to take into account war’s aural dimension, the constant ricochets and volleys, the sheer deafening loudness of each bombardment and attack. Rendered mute, something strange happens: the battlefield becomes somehow less physical and more deathly, a spectral no man’s land, dematerialized and weightless. Though musical cues attempt to compensate for this loss (drumbeats for cannon fire, cymbals for detonation, whistles and plucked bows for passing bullets) the effect remains stubbornly non-diegetic, insufficiently synchronized to the melee on screen. Bodies fall, but we don’t feel them. Mud sticks to everything, but it seems painted on, lacking any sense of clammy palpability. Buildings collapse, but they lack bulk or mass; rather, it is as if everything is happening in a dream, the soldiers weary sleepwalkers miming manoeuvres, the landscape composed of smoke and fog, as miasmic and insubstantial as a gas attack.