Twenty-eight and a half years after The Last Temptation of Christ, faith has again driven Scorsese outdoors, and into another wilderness—rural Japan in the seventeenth century. The trailer for Silence portrays it as a different film to the one cinema-goers will encounter. Fast cuts coupled with tremolo strings and intense, building percussion lend the trailer a sense of urgency which is wholly lacking from the film itself. This is in large part due to Scorsese’s complete refusal to include any non-diegetic sound. The film begins with an extended, almost uncomfortably long black screen, with only the ambient noise of a rural environment as accompaniment. The aural tone of the film is thus set from its very first second.
Whilst preoccupied with silence, the film knows how to effectively use sound. A late scene begins with the sound of Rodrigues praying aloud in his cell, with no other ambient noise. But then the sounds of the prison beyond the walls of his cell filter in and build, until he is drowned out by a cacophony of snoring and screaming. The power of the scene is only fully disclosed when the source of the noise is revealed. (Hint: it’s not what we, and Rodrigues, think, but rather something far more disturbing.)
This silence becomes more and more troubling as the film progresses, and as Rodrigues (played with a sensitive combination of warmth and naivety by Andrew Garfield) faces ever increasing hostility. In the film’s early scenes, this hostility is translated into an ambiguous sense of place, with Japan being made to feel disorienting and often insurmountable. Rodrigo Prieto, who so effectively documented the minute details of decadence in The Wolf of Wall Street, proves just as impeccable a collaborator for Scorsese here. A particularly beautiful shot shows the priests descending a tall set of stairs, but either Scorsese or Prieto had the beautifully simple idea of twisting the shot ninety degrees so that they descend not top to bottom but left to right. The result is an arrestingly decontextualised shot. The lack of the sound of footsteps only pushes the shot further towards abstraction.
Whilst not urgent, Silence displays a phenomenal control of timing. In one scene, Scorsese delays a beheading just long enough for the audience to feel safe before abruptly unleashing it on us in a moment of extreme velocity yet extreme clarity.
In the same scene, we are given a single, long take of a naked man trampling the image of Christ and then running out of the prison compound after being set free, with the officers then returning to their lodgings. Whilst not as showy as the famous Copacabana shot from Goodfellas, it is an extremely powerful take: shot from behind the thick wooden bars of Rodrigues’s cell, with the action choreographed shrewdly in the gaps between the bars.
Without the use of any cuts, the audience is left to view exactly what Rodrigues views, in real time. The conventional grammar of cinema—at its heart shot-reverse shot—disintegrates into an extended moment of realism which aligns us with the imprisoned Rodrigues.
Whilst Garfield and Adam Driver give extremely solid performances, Liam Neeson delivers the standout performance among the Portuguese priests. The nuance and subtlety of his performance creates a perfectly ambiguous character—exactly what the role demands. The Japanese side of the cast is, on the whole, extremely strong. Issei Ogata, playing the chief inquisitor, is a particular standout. He delivers a terrifyingly sinister performance which nonetheless somehow never totally eradicates the audience’s sympathy.
Though they share the same cinematographer and similar runtimes, The Wolf of Wall Street and Silence are vastly different films. Whilst the former is a comedy exploring excess, the latter is a sombre work of immense control. This is not to say Silence totally lacks humour. It is funny each time the Judas figure Kichijiro turns up and begs Rodrigues, the very person he betrays, to hear his confession. It is funny that the Portguese priests should use the few moments they have outside the claustrophobic confines of their Japanese hideaway to sit on a rock and sun themselves.
Yet these humorous moments are few and far between, and Silence remains a long and at times taxing work. But do not let this put you off ; this is exactly what it needs to be.
The ‘post-truth’ era is a product of liberal denial
As 2016 drew to a close, liberal commentators had already made up their minds that a new era was dawning in politics. The shock of Brexit, compounded by the horrifying prospect of a forthcoming Trump presidency, caused them to recede deep into their journalistic shells.
This, they hurriedly decided, would be the era of post-truth politics, a new Dark Age for the world. In their frazzled minds, the ignorant electorate had lapped up Trump’s lies and lost them the election. Floating in their liberal bubble, they could not conceive of a world in which voters did not share their exact worldview.
The arrogance is almost tangible. At every fork in the road, liberals took the wrong turning, both in the referendum and in the presidential election. In the referendum, they refused to seriously debate immigration policy. Opposition to the freedom of movement was antagonistically conflated with racism, and millions of voters were written off as gullible Little Englanders. Genuine patriots, concerned about what they saw as the EU’s hold on British sovereignty, were roundly mocked for their “old-fashioned views”.
Many floating voters did not believe the Remain camp’s consistent scaremongering and doomsaying. Indeed, the Government appeared to be so convinced of a Remain victory that it saw little point in preparing for a potential Brexit, and publicly announced as much.
In the American presidential election, the DNC conspired to rid itself of a genuinely popular challenger from the left in the form of Bernie Sanders. With Sanders as Democratic nomination, Trump’s cries of “Lock Her Up” and “Drain the Swamp” would have lost their formidable sting. Clinton, although eminently qualified and capable during her time as Secretary of State, was the worst possible candidate to run against the anti-establishment Trump. Similarly flawed was her campaign plan to play up her social liberalism and identity politics at the expense of class-based economic policy. Voters in the rust belt, inspired in 2008 by Obama’s promise of change, did not see the same potential in Clinton.
Many who espouse the idea of a new “post-truth” era are quick to overlook these errors, and to pin the blame onto the electorate. They are eager to paint the world in Manichean terms, the good and the bad, the progressive, enlightened liberals against the lie-spouting, poor-hating Republicans.
Only the chosen few, some implied, could marshal true rationality and logic in support of their liberal worldview. They patronisingly accused the electorate of being unduly affected by emotional appeals, as if the American people had unanimously decided to ignore reality in the run up to 8 November.
In fact, accusations of being “post truth” have been about since Orwell admitted to often feeling as if “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world”. To paraphrase Brecht, it felt as if it would have been more convenient for the Clinton camp to dissolve the people and elect another.
Many claim that Donald Trump’s ability to flatly deny something that he probably said is strong evidence of the existence of post-truth politics. During the presidential campaign it is true that the billionaire got away largely scot-free when caught telling untruths. But this is not representative of post-truth politics: many voters opted for Trump’s egregious style of lying rather than what they saw as Clinton’s naturally untrustworthy nature. Had Sanders run, voters may well have switched their allegiances and penalised Trump.
Similarly, in the Leave campaign, neither side were considered wholly trustworthy. Both campaigns fairly accused the other of bolstering statistics for political purposes and dishonesty could not be fairly punished.
Although the forthcoming Trump presidency will see many attempted lies, claims of a “post-truth era” have been greatly exaggerated by a liberal elite unwilling to shoulder the blame.
It is highly unlikely that we see Theresa May adopt Donald Trump’s brash style of intentionally lying in the next General Election. Both Trump and Brexit are symptoms of a unique time in world politics, but they will not herald in a new “post-truth” era.