#de stilte rond christine m.

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new-to-me #638 - De stilte rond Christine M. (A Question of Silence)

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Three Women Murder to Stand Up Against EVIL! "A Question of Silence" reviewed! (Cult Epics / Blu-ray)

“A Question of Silence” Laughs Louder than Words on Blu-ray! Three different in age and lifestyle women carry on with the routine of their normal lives until police offices arrest them on the charge of murdering a male owner of a clothing boutique.  Having seemingly no motive and have no connection to each other, never having met each other before, the confounded prosecution hire a psychiatrist…

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A Question of Silence - De stilte rond Christine M. (1982)

vs.

Working Girls (1986)

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Henriëtte Tol and Cox Habbema in A Question of Silence/De stilte rond Christine M. (1982, dir. Marleen Gorris)

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A Question of Silence (De stilte rond Christine M.) | Marleen Gorris | 1982

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Women in Film Challenge 2017:

[34/52] De stilte rond Christine M., dir. Marleen Gorris (Netherlands, 1982)

Do you really wonder why Christine stopped talking? Nobody is listening.

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Catching Up #40: A Question of Silence (dir. Marleen Gorris, 1982)

Imagine a feminist remake of Adam's Rib (Cukor, 1949). That's A Question of Silence, at its heart.

The Tracy/Hepburn classic pretends to be feminist (within its historical moment) but ultimately confirms/restores patriarchal norms by concealing the fact that the legal code to which Tracy appeals ("no one has a right to break the law!") does not supersede the patriarchy but is rather an instrument of it. A Question of Silence begins in nearly the same territory as Adam's Rib -- here, three women commit an atrocious murder and another woman (in this case a forensic psychiatrist named Janine) is called upon to craft some part of their defense. But whereas Amanda (Hepburn) of Adam's Rib sets out from the start to defend a woman who killed her cheating husband (and the film sets out to stop her and restore normativity), Janine does not at first understand what could've prompted three women who didn't know one another to murder a perfect stranger over apparently nothing. By the film's halfway point, though, Janine has had an awakening.

A Question of Silence doesn't ask us to see the lurid crime which these women commit as justifiable; rather, it urges us to see it as random, hideous, hypocritical, and, as such, perfectly symmetrical to the accumulated humiliation, marginalization, and otherwise infuriating dehumanization that male-centric culture casually doles out to women every day. A Question of Silence points out that the legal system is set up to redress certain kinds of injustice but to absorb or ignore other kinds of injustice. It reveals the utter blindness of a legal system the lacks consciousness of structural oppression and regards its delineations of sanity or insanity as natural and universal rather than historical and hegemonic. What justice can be sought for the devaluation and sidelining of women as a class, when that's not even considered a crime?

I've long argued that courtrooms are redundant in movies, since the film itself presents (or ought to present) evidence, which we the audience-jury pore over and come to conclusions about. Does Mr. Deeds Goes to Town really need to end with a trial, for instance? In most films the trial functions as a structuring suspense-producing device (as in The Paradine Case or Anatomy of a Murder), but some rare films subject the process itself to analysis. That's the case in A Question of Silence. The trial is put on trial here: because, of course, all aspects of legal proceedings and the legal system are tainted by the same sexism as the rest of the world. So, Janine's interviews, rather than producing impartial recollections of events, point out the banality of sexism-- how men reproduce it almost unthinkingly, how women internalize almost helplessly. When Janine begins to find solidarity with these women (a sharply-edited moment of consciousness-formation, depicted as a series of gazes meeting and diverging virtually, of memory seeing itself, fighting itself, then acknowledging itself), her professional training at first prevents her from understanding where they're coming from and the essence of their violent act. And when the case finally goes to trial, Janine faces sexist bullying from the prosecutor and tone-policing from her husband.

In the end, the court's ignorance of its ideological blindness demands a singular, surprising, and possibly even hair-raising response. And it gets it. And that scene moved me. To be sure, A Question of Silence is blatant polemical provocation. And as with most agit-prop art objects, its importance relates directly to the historical moment that produced it, and its relevance and capacity to shock and/or divide audiences fades with time. I'm not surprised that A Question of Silence was never released on DVD. But there's still something remarkable here -- or, at the very least, historically necessary. This film needed to exist, and it still needs to exist.

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De stilte rond Christine M. (1982) by Marleen Gorris 

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A Question of Silence (De stilte rond Christine M.) | Marleen Gorris | 1982

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de stilte rond christine m. / a question of silence, 1982, marleen gorris

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A Question of Silence (De stilte rond Christine M.) | Marleen Gorris | 1982

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A Question of Silence (De stilte rond Christine M.) | Marleen Gorris | 1982