A Silent Voice and Not-So-Silent Legs
By Arya Amritansu
Director Naoko Yamada plays with the conventional idea of language through the synesthetic use of movement in the 2016 movie, Koe No Katachi — popularly known as A Silent Voice. The visual representations of movement illustrate how varied our interactions can be. A Silent Voice is far more complex than our words; the movie carefully constructs the universality of movement by exhibiting the ways in which we interact with it beyond visual perception. So much of the movie’s nuances lie in the body movements of the characters and the cinematography.
A Silent Voice explores a form of communication that transcends conventional dialogue. The absence of sound in Nishimiya’s life — who has limited hearing capabilities — opens a doorway to a plethora of subtle tones in the movie that communicate more than one might perceive at first glance. A nervous tapping of the feet, or a pause in the character’s stride, or an abrupt increase in pace, or even something as simple as the direction of the character’s feet renders so much more depth than any exposition created through dialogue. That is the beauty of motion — it alters meaning in ways that go beyond linguistic limitations.
It is all too known now that Yamada’s signature is using legs as a framing device. Her form always owed more to French director Robert Bresson, whose films did away with theatrical baggage and stylized expression to reduce cinema to the absolute essentials of image, sound, and actor. The long takes of characters’ legs in Yamada’s work achieve a similar effect as Bresson’s long takes of hands: a near-expressionless canvas that allows the audience to lean in and linger on the context of the scene, thereby absorbing the emotional and sensory texture of that moment.
Ishida’s walk in the opening scene of the movie captures his aimless direction — with his slumped shoulders and hunched back, forming an immediate contrast to his carefree strut as a child. Yamada says that the staff fixated on this difference in walks, which makes the divide between his past and present self strikingly clear. The entire opening montage perfectly establishes his life as a little hell-raiser, made better by Yamada’s insistence of The Who’s “My Generation” as the accompanying song. In retrospect, when we look at his first walk, we see a dejected man, taking slow, unsure strides; this culminates into the scene where we see him contemplating suicide.
Yamada uses lower extremities to deconstruct a character’s psyche — how they are positioned and what it says about how they are feeling. It is not just a clever directorial quirk, but it is one that defines the way she tells stories. She wants us to understand the small nuances that make us human: the subtleties of falling in love, the rift between partners, the hardships of moving on, and the extreme pain of loss. Our human experience is captured by her attention to detail and nothing so eloquently does so as her use of legs: they back away, and move forward; they sometimes walk confidently, and sometimes meekly; they might be in motion, or they might be still. The motions of our legs are often subconscious products of our own reflexes that tell us truths that words cannot. They act to show power and uncertainty and they peer into our insecurities and give context to power dynamics. What a character is experiencing can sometimes only be told by using their legs: they can highlight the playfulness of youth or the misery of anxiety; and that is how Yamada manages to build a world where meaning is expressed through mediums that transcend linguistic barriers; her intuition and understanding of human subtleties allows us to peer into the depths of our characters souls.
Yamada uses her expertise in one of the most crucial scenes of the movie: Nishimiya finally giving up on her life after reaching the crux of self-loathing. We see Nishimiya climb the ledge of the balcony, while the flash of the fireworks projects her shadow across the window. Ishida screams her name and falls over a table — Nishimiya cannot hear anything, still thinking she is alone. We get a shot from his point of view that shows her with her back turned to the camera and the sky in-front of her. Her suicide is veiled by a curtain, not for us or Ishida to see. It is a personal moment for Nishimiya and perhaps the most visually striking sequence of the film. For the first time in the movie, Ishida manages to grab hold of Shoko before she falls. He laments his failure to communicate with her and pleads that starting now he will change — continuing one of the films central messages: You can change starting now. Yamada uses her signature leg shot here: Nishimiya’s legs hanging in the mid-air, her life suspended as Ishida’s legs frantically look for support while he summons every ounce of his strength to save Nishimiya. It is brilliant, poignant, and loud. It is the essence of this very film — it’s powerful. It conveys the feelings of a moment so eloquently without the use of any words. It is in the spirit of how Yamada directs and what this film is about.
With A Silent Voice, Yamada captures the invaluable beauty of movement. It devotes so much attention to visual and material representation of movement to highlight how nuanced this interaction is. Even the title gives a sense of tangibility to an otherwise abstract concept. Communication goes so far beyond what we say with our words. The film does not treat any form of communication as inherently more precious; rather all form a unique integral part of our understanding of each other. This is what Yamada expresses — that the things often heard most clearly usually are not said, they are lived.