In Quiet Pictures, Sarah Artt argues that silence in film is vitally important, especially to our understanding of women's and femme-presenting people's experiences. Artt explores silence through the work of four filmmakers–Joanna Hogg, Lynne Ramsay, Céline Sciamma, and Lucile Hadžhalilovic–who have been hitherto critically undervalued, a state of affairs that this book triumphantly corrects. Through close analysis of a range of their films, Artt helps us to understand how silence can work as erasure, as unwitting complicity, as resistance, and in many other ways–all of which reveal resoundingly how silence relates to power. Most thrillingly, silence, in Artt's assessment, “becomes a rich space of potential,” for redefining gender, identity, and how people relate to one another. A terrific book.

Edward Lamberti, Writer and Film Historian, UK

Sarah's Artt's Quiet Pictures offers a reading of how silence in film may open a space for new potentialities of the gaze and a more generous reciprocity. The author demonstrates how silence “creates a space for something to happen” in contemporary British and French cinema, and discusses the multivalent gazes and gestures that fill the space. Artt's readings of filmic silence in representations of motherhood, childhood, women's erotic agency and masculinity in various cinematic contexts is particularly enlightening. Quiet Pictures also provides an excellent, informed and useful survey of work on silence in various contexts from film and video to literature and daily life.

Joyce Goggin, Senior Associate Professor of Literature, Film, and Digital Media, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands