Last week, something unexpected happened when I was at the movies. I was sitting in the tiny 35-seat Manzler screening room in Nashville's Belcourt Theater, watching No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary about the ongoing violence in the disputed West Bank region of Masafer Yatta. I tried to eat my popcorn dinner crunchlessly as I watched people's homes being bulldozed by tanks and the friends at the film's heart, Masafer Yatta native Basel Adra and Jerusalem-based journalist Yuval Abraham, struggled to maintain hope. After 95 minutes of tough viewing, the credits rolled.
That's when I got a shock. No one in the small, packed screening room said a word. Everyone sat for the entirety of the credits sequence; no "excuse me's" were whispered so that someone could be first out of the parking lot. The house lights came on; the silence continued. I walked out and, curious, perched on a low windowsill until my fellow viewers were all gone. Not one word.
I've seen many vividly disturbing films recently, including at the Belcourt — Nickel Boys, for example, or, last Oscar season, The Zone of Interest. People exited those films quietly, too, muting their whispers to companions and greetings to the staff ready to sweep up. This was different. No Other Land is skillfully directed to evoke feelings of anxiety and claustrophobia; extremely shaky footage and editing that smears time (it helps that some of the villagers live in caves, where day and night are indistinguishable) unsettles any elements of linearity or resolution. This film unfolds in a present tense so immediate that it breathes on the viewer. The distance required to shake that off only comes with time.
As I drove home with the radio off, I was grateful for the silence No Other Land demanded. I'm breaking no ground when I say such strongly compelled space for thought is a rare gift in our scatterbrained age; when it does open up, like most people, I feel uncomfortable within it. I want to reach for a podcast or some music, wrapping my strong feelings in sonic foam. Yet I also know that meaningful exchanges don't exist without the space made by silence. Music requires it; otherwise it's just noise. Sometimes that silence is organized, as in John Cage's famous piece 4'33", in which a conductor stands with their hands extended while the orchestra does not play for the length of the piece. I've experienced that piece; it reminded me of the period of unstructured prayer built into the Catholic mass. A welcome, agreed-upon pause that a participant can embrace by going inward or by pricking up her ears to hear whatever ambient noises ping around the room is one gateway into silence, through spiritual practice or artistic mandate.
Back home at my computer, I posted about what had happened on Bluesky. The responses started rolling in — others had found themselves in similar situations in years past. The films that caused such sonic blackouts, it turns out, often depicted the sense-destroying noise of war or persecution: Platoon, The Zone of Interest, Apocalypse Now, Hotel Rwanda and Schindler's List were all mentioned numerous times. Others mentioned titles that surprised me a bit: the sci-fi dystopias Fahrenheit 451 and Videodrome, and the horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What connects these films is obvious: not only the shock of violence and mayhem, but a hint of "it could happen here," an insistent call for empathy that goes deeper than the surface.
Feature films, building longform narratives across the wide space of a screen, have the potential to make viewers feel like witnesses, as if they are not experiencing something second hand but are living it in real time. This is what films have carried over from the ancient art form of tragedy – the ability (not often fully realized, mind you) to instill catharsis, which blocks the habitual reactions that allow people to cope with challenging information. Silence is the response that arises as a viewer absorbs what she cannot cope with. It's the start of really processing something. Films themselves often portray audiences stunned into silence, but the outcome is very different. Think of a movie like Little Miss Sunshine, in which the misfit would-be beauty queen Olive does a wild dance to Rick James' "Superfreak" as a hardened crowd of pageant parents looks on. Their silence is a form of bigotry; they are witnesses, but they can't really see. It takes Olive's family, joining her onstage and making her dance huge, to defeat their narrow-mindedness. Only then does one (notably eccentric looking) parent jump up and yell his approval. Similar scenes show up in comedies like Napoleon Dynamite and Wet Hot American Summer and dramas like Shakespeare in Love, always signifying some kind of conversion running through an audience: what seemed ridiculous, or scandalous, earns approval and changes the whole narrative.
The rare real-life cleansing experience of a crowd sharing silence is very different than these examples. Where they connect is within the strange dynamic of absorbing in a crowd – a very personal experience that is also communal. After seeing No Other Land, I was left with my own feelings and had to pay attention to them – no cheating. In Little Miss Sunshine, the pause before applause is that lonely moment, but the end game is communal acceptance, communal joy. These scenes resonate because as fans experiencing our absorption in a beloved art personally yet often expressing it in a crowd, we're always in a state of flux. We want to hold the experience close, and make our own judgments even as we also want to shout across the barricade of our own prejudices and find friends who love the performance, too.
Thinking about these matters, I started wondering if music could do the same thing. I've definitely been in rooms, many times, where a pause interrupted the flow of rhythm and melody. But I think such pauses serve a different purpose when caused by music. Instead of isolating each person within their own minds, to encourage hard thinking, silence at concerts enhances community. It's an aspect of fandom, a form of commentary in and of itself, and most of all, an aspect of community building.
I came to this conclusion after looking back over my public diary of shows I've attended – that is, my archive of clips from my days as a critic at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Signed into the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database and searching terms like "hushed the crowd," I discovered a few commonalities among the performances seized by such moments. They took place in all kinds of venues, from the Hollywood Bowl to the Bowery Ballroom, but not every type of artist could — or seemed to want to — spirit them into existence.
Unlike classical music, which has developed a detailed set of rules to ensure its audiences' attention, popular music fills space with sound that is usually amplified, rhythmic and hook-laden — that is, it's made to engage the senses, move the body and evoke a loud response. From its origin point in call-and-response rituals at enslaved Americans' secular and social gatherings from New Orleans' Congo Square to the Azusa Street Revival, popular music is built to move the whole body — including the vocal cords. (I wrote a book about this! It's called Good Booty.) Given this history, the kind of enduring silence that so impressed me at the Belcourt feels different when I'm out for a night at the club.
It does sometimes feel appropriate, though. Even special. The dozen or so times I've been in loud rooms suddenly hushed by an artist's charisma, emotions like respect, gratitude and wonder swirled around in the stillness. Extended silence during a concert often feels like a gift an audience grants a beloved artist, an invisible garland thrown at their feet. One example: Barbra Streisand at the (then) Staples Center, teasing out the first few phrases of "The Way We Were," as her devotees sat in almost unbearable anticipation. Another: Chris Cornell, touring his first solo effort away from Soundgarden, having entrusted his fans with his feelings of vulnerability at trying out this new material, rewarded with determined focus from all corners of the theater. Another: Fleet Foxes at the beautiful Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State, new on the scene and enjoying that kind of crush-level appreciation from fans who maybe hadn't heard harmonies or arrangements like theirs before. The silence these audiences offered was a form of support and appreciation. It was as warm as a teenage girl's scream.
Another way artists have earned silence is through impressive skill. I'm thinking about Sting, who actually asked that his fans leave a bit of space around each song he played during a concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall, where he shared a program of Elizabethan music accompanied by the Bosnian archlute player Edin Karamazov. The crowd complied, maybe out of love for their blond troubadour, but also because Karamazov displayed astounding levels of virtuosity. In a different way, Glen Hansard won over the crowd during a Swell Season show at Hollywood's El Rey Theater after he stomped on his guitar pedal so hard he broke it during the confrontational, romantic, "Say It To Me Now." He went ahead and finished the song without amplification, and the audience quieted down completely, answering his effort with their own. A Yo La Tengo show at New York's Westbeth Theater also showed me how musical commitment can inspire quiet. Ending a four-show engagement, the trio of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew reached a rare level of seemingly telepathic interplay, and those in attendance — many of whom had been at every night of this run — locked in as if they were actually players, their brain waves helping steer the band's subtle movements.
Sometimes subject matter can be an impetus for quiet at a musical performance. The many times I've seen Tori Amos perform "Me and a Gun," her groundbreaking song about being raped, which she performs alone at her keyboard, have always been quiet occasions; her beloved community of listeners insistently honors her courage in telling that terrifying story. At tributes to recently departed artists, from John Prine to Michael Jackson, I've also been immersed in respectful silence. Jackson's memorial service at Staples Center was a lengthy affair including all manner of testimonials from distressed family members, longtime friends and many musical colleagues. It was Stevie Wonder who finally was able to fully quiet the arena crowd, not only with his irresistible spirit and musical genius, but with his song selection. He chose two songs that seemed to speak directly about Jackson's sudden if long-anticipated demise, "Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer" and "They Won't Go When I Go." I've never heard or seen an artist better read a room.
Ultimately, silence punctuating the flow of a concert is about preserving the present tense, as it is at the movies, but in a way that's uniquely suited to music's ability to eradicate the distance between us, however provisionally. After viewing No Other Land, I wanted to be alone. Solitude felt necessary to process what I'd just seen. But in those windows of quiet changing the shape of evenings otherwise full of joyful noise, I found a way to become closer to everyone around me. Music does need silence to take shape, to make sense. And we need the silence it can generate, so that we can reach across us and recognize each other — as fans, as sharers in a congregation, as believers in the vibrational hum that, beneath it all, never ceases.
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