The Great Silence
_The Great Silence_ focuses on the world’s largest single aperture radio telescope, located in Esperanza, Puerto Rico, which transmits and captures radio waves to and from the farthest edges of the universe. This site is also home to the last remaining wild population of endangered Puerto Rican parrots, Amazona vittata, who make their habitat in the surrounding Rio Abajo forest. Allora & Calzadilla collaborated with science fiction author Ted Chiang on a subtitled script that explores translation as a device to trace and ponder the irreducible gaps between living, nonliving, human, animal, technological, and cosmic actors. In the spirit of a fable, the subtitled story presents the bird’s observations on humans’ search for life outside this planet, while using the concept of vocal learning—something that both parrots and humans have in common—as a source of reflection upon acousmatic voices, ventriloquisms, and the vibrations that form the basis of speech and the universe itself.
| Director | Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla |
| Actor | Emmanuel Bernier |
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If it weren’t for the subtitles accompanying a voice — missing, in this case! — it wouldn’t be a film, just images.
Or rather, simple images produced by cutting-edge technological devices: microphone, camera, lenses — an entire apparatus taken for granted in our over-technologized world with its sterile horizons. Devices that slowly reveal… another device. A radio telescope, a gigantic gadget of scrap metal supposedly capable of calling out to and receiving sounds from extraterrestrial life, in doing so fulfilling our myths of human grandeur. This is quietly pointed out by the film’s silent narrator: a small green parrot, endemic to Puerto Rico, an endangered species known for its advanced language abilities, though here mostly mobilized to illustrate the very real threat the Homo genus poses to its survival. Inaudible to the mega-machine, its voice becomes a metaphor for the genius of the techno-industrial complex in rendering the world unavailable — as Hartmut Rosa might put it — in other words, in impoverishing our sensitive horizons, mass extinctions included.
But is that enough to make us nauseous? To rethink our cheap myths or, at the very least, our Hollywood images of grandeur à la Arrival — itself a story adapted from the writings of science fiction author Ted Chiang? Haven’t we learned, by now, to shift, open, and change our perspective?
Blue, red, whatever pill… Isn’t it time we move to the next level and learn to destroy the gadgets that have become our chains, our downfall?
Emmanuel Bernier
Head of Acquisitions at Tënk
-
Français
16 mn
Language: Français -
English
16 mn
Language: English
- Année 2014
- Pays Puerto Rico
- Durée 16
- Producteur Allora & Calzadilla
- Langue Without dialogue
- Sous-titres French, English
- Résumé court A fable-like meditation in which an endangered parrot reflects on humanity’s search for life in the cosmos.
- Ordre 4
If it weren’t for the subtitles accompanying a voice — missing, in this case! — it wouldn’t be a film, just images.
Or rather, simple images produced by cutting-edge technological devices: microphone, camera, lenses — an entire apparatus taken for granted in our over-technologized world with its sterile horizons. Devices that slowly reveal… another device. A radio telescope, a gigantic gadget of scrap metal supposedly capable of calling out to and receiving sounds from extraterrestrial life, in doing so fulfilling our myths of human grandeur. This is quietly pointed out by the film’s silent narrator: a small green parrot, endemic to Puerto Rico, an endangered species known for its advanced language abilities, though here mostly mobilized to illustrate the very real threat the Homo genus poses to its survival. Inaudible to the mega-machine, its voice becomes a metaphor for the genius of the techno-industrial complex in rendering the world unavailable — as Hartmut Rosa might put it — in other words, in impoverishing our sensitive horizons, mass extinctions included.
But is that enough to make us nauseous? To rethink our cheap myths or, at the very least, our Hollywood images of grandeur à la Arrival — itself a story adapted from the writings of science fiction author Ted Chiang? Haven’t we learned, by now, to shift, open, and change our perspective?
Blue, red, whatever pill… Isn’t it time we move to the next level and learn to destroy the gadgets that have become our chains, our downfall?
Emmanuel Bernier
Head of Acquisitions at Tënk
-
Français
Duration: 16 minutesLanguage: Français16 mn -
English
Duration: 16 minutesLanguage: English16 mn
- Année 2014
- Pays Puerto Rico
- Durée 16
- Producteur Allora & Calzadilla
- Langue Without dialogue
- Sous-titres French, English
- Résumé court A fable-like meditation in which an endangered parrot reflects on humanity’s search for life in the cosmos.
- Ordre 4
