The Quiet Room
Clip 1: ‘I don’t want to talk about it’
3 min 2 sec
Taken from the feature The Quiet Room (1996)
Original title classification M – this clip chosen to be PG
Availability of the complete title
Curator’s clip description
The girl (Chloe Ferguson) listens as her parents argue in the next room. Kate, a babysitter (Kate Greetham), arrives as the parents are about to go to counselling. Kate asks the silent child if she has gone mad. Later, the child almost forgets she is not speaking.
Curator’s notes
The film is partly an exercise in sound and the human voice. We hear voices from other rooms, the internal voice of the child’s narration, sometimes two or three different voices at the same time, all of which are still intelligible. De Heer builds up a sense that each voice is separate, isolated from the others. The stillness of the camera work also sets up a sense of sterility within the family. There is order but not harmony. Certain shots also suggest a child’s way of looking at things – such as the way the child plays with her teeth, looking at them in the mirror, perhaps because the babysitter has braces and she wonders if she will have to have them later. In her narration, the words ‘practically an adult’ are like a terrible condemnation of the babysitter.
Paul Byrnes, curator
have teachers’ notes.
