Making Sense of Noise and Silence in La Captive

Abstract

Ambient sound and silence largely function in film to hold narrative space and time in place. They are rarely allowed just to be—they must be made to speak. La Captive (Belgium/France 2000, dir. Chantal Akerman) is an interrogation of this impulse to interrogate aural opacity and absence, in the context of a male need to probe the female. Here, a woman’s silence becomes a refusal to be known by a man and the clacking of high heels becomes maddeningly erotic and elusive, while verbal interrogation leads nowhere and florid music functions as an excess of misleading expressivity. La Captive is structured both thematically and formally by listening, and it suggests the way that the latter, like looking, organizes the gendered epistemological drive of narrative and perception in film.