the sound of silence | Experimental Short Film

Director, actor, and editor: Christopher Chow
Cinematographer and colorist: Kimseng Suon

Shot at Pomona College with Sony A7s3 + Sony 24-70mm lens

Inspired by Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello and Expressionist Theatre of the 1920s

"Everybody adjusts his mask the best he can – that is, the external mask, for we also have an inner mask, which is not in accord with the outer one. And nothing is true! Oh yes, the sea is true, the mountain is true, the stone, the blade of grass are true… but man?”

“It is this fear that language will somehow fail us that produces the crises in our lives. These inner crises are the most difficult to express, for how can language be used to express the inexpressible?”

“When a man lives,” wrote Pirandello, “he lives and does not see himself in the act of living.” If he should pass in front of a mirror, “he turns away his eyes, so as not to see himself, or else, in disgust, he spits at his image, or, again, clenches his fist to break (the mirror)–in a word–there occurs a crisis, and that crisis is my theatre.”