This documentary is calling for a nothing less than a global audio detox; it’s about reclaiming the lost virtue of silence. The film occasionally hits a rather loud note of passive-aggressive piety, but it is very persuasive. The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin used to tell his pupils to cultivate and appreciate silence: musicians need it the way painters need a blank canvas. But the canvases of our lives are increasingly splodged and muddled with traffic noise, street noise, loud music from other people’s houses and cars, not to mention our own, TVs and radios. Then of course there is the even more insidious digital white noise we fill our heads with – the frantically insecure smartphone-checking chatter on Facebook, Twitter, etc. (I am on this final point of righteousness shamefacedly letting the first stone fall from my hand.)
It’s a cultural tinnitus and the film is right to complain, although it could have suggested more in the way of practical remedies, and I could frankly done without the vow-of-silence guy hitchhiking across the States, holding up handwritten statements to the camera and thereby announcing his moral superiority loud and clear. Well: silence is golden. Maybe this film could have been released in an alternative silent version.
