Taciturn Masculinities: Radical Quiet and Sounding Linguistic Difference in Valeska Grisebach's Western

Abstract

This article brings into dialogue the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Berlin School filmmaker Valeska Grisebach to consider the relationship between film sound, gender and settler colonialism in Western ( Valeska Grisebach, 2017 ). I draw connections between Nancy's Listening and Eugenie Brinkema's concept of radical quiet to examine how the film's sonic composition attends to the sonority of silence and voice. I argue that Western combines sonic strategies of radical quiet and part-subtitled multilingual dialogue to undermine the sovereign silence associated with the genre's white heroic masculinity and challenge linguistic nonreciprocity in settler colonial landscapes. The article contends that these strategies work together to destabilise mastery within the narrative's discursive economy and within the spectatorial experience, shifting the spectator towards a mode of Nancean listening that invites defamiliarising encounters with foreignness that depart from existing theories of embodied spectatorship. Western brings to the fore the political stakes of silence, linguistic difference, and Nancean listening as model of communication, as they intersect with the film's feminist and anti-colonialist project of revisionist critique.