BlackLab: Adventures in Still Pictures

Silence and the Origins of Modern Remembrance

First World War Army Recruitment Poster

Inspired by Dave Dunnico’s post referring to Kenotaphion by Jonty Semper.

Curated by conceptual artist Jonty Semper and released in 2001, this 2 CD set collects 83 Armistice Day and Remembrance Sundays dating back to 1929.  Each of these frozen moments is anything but silent of course. The crackle and hiss of old technology impregnates the nation’s pause for reflection with an unseemly mechanistic fervour. Even as recording techniques improve, silence itself constantly remains elusive; children cry, unheeding heels click across the cobbles with a subversive insolence; protesters puncture the air. The one consistent motif is those sombre chimes of Big Ben, sometimes heard close to and sometimes from a distance. Whatever there proximity, they resonate from deep within the seat of Government, reminding us of the place of power that sends its young men and women to lay down their lives on our behalf. – Sid Smith.

The Guardian features more on Kenotaphion, including an interview with Semper.

Meanwhile, Historian Dr. Adrian Gregory has written this essay to give Semper’s work historical context.

“Although several people would claim credit for the idea, the suggestion to hold a universal silence came from Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, formerly High Commissioner in South Africa. On November 4 1919 he wrote to Lord Milner suggesting that such a silent pause would be essential for preserving the memory of the war:

In the hearts of our people there is a real desire to find some lasting expression of the feelings for those who gave their live sin the war. They want something done now while the memories of sacrifice are in the minds of all, for there is a dread — too well grounded in experience — that those who have gone will not always be foremost in the thoughts of all and that when the fruits of sacrifice become our daily bread, there will be few occasions to remind us of what we so clearly realise today.

[...]

The broadcasting of a silence might seem peculiar. Contemporaries were aware of this, the Radio Times noted in 1935, “here is one of the great paradoxes, that no broadcast is more impressive than the silence following the last dashing strokes of Big Ben.” But the silence was not empty, what was broadcast was the absence of deliberate noise. Technically it represented a challenge:

Its impressiveness is intensified by the fact that the silence is not a dead silence, for Big Ben strikes the hour, and then the bickering of sparrows, the crisp rustle of falling leaves, the creasing of pigeon wings as they take flight, uneasy at the strange hush, contrast with the traffic din of London some minutes before. Naturally vigilant control of the microphone is essential. Audible distress near to the microphone would create a picture out of perspective as regards to the crowds solemn impassivity and feelings.

Our job is to reduce all local noises to the right proportions, so that the silence may be heard for what it really is, a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.

These recordings, drawn from radio and other sources are the embodiment and record of this technique. Increasingly broadcasting became important in the experience of the silence, more and more people experienced the silence through listening to its broadcasts as radio ownership spread. But one thing must be remembered in listening to these recordings, although broadcasting brought the silence into the home, it was still, on an imaginative level, perceived as a collective activity. The power was based on the knowledge that the silence was bring observed more or less universally and that in observing the silence the listener was linked with the millions of others doing the same thing at the same time. This is an imaginative leap that is worth making in listening to these recordings in order to understand their power.”