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Stilte rond Christine M., De (1982)

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22 comments in total

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6 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Powerful and challenging, 5 August 2001

Author: portobellobelle

Very powerful and thoughtful. Much superior to Gorris' more-acclaimed Antonia's Line, in my opinion. This film has none of the cutesiness of Antonia but all of the thoughtfulness and thematic weight. The theme is a subtle examination of the roles of men and women in Dutch society, and I guess it could apply to many societies. The film has a viewpoint, but it problematizes and complicates matters so that it's impossible for the viewer to blindly accept that viewpoint. It examines SUBTLE discrimination and dehumanization.

The only frustration I had was the fact that the copy I viewed did not give subtitles to a lot of the dialogue--e.g., a woman listens to the radio for about a minute, but non-Dutch speakers (like myself) don't understand any of it, and I'm guessing that with a filmmaker as careful as Gorris, this dialogue is important.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
A darn-near masterpiece, 22 September 2005

Author: WildConvergence from Toronto

I'm not even sure if a DVD is available in North America, and if it isn't it would be a tremendous shame. "A Question of Silence" is a tough, rigorous, unsentimental and unblinking examination of justice and is, as another comment observed, a far less mainstream and safe film than Goriss's "Antonia's Line."

For anyone who has even a passing interest in dark, uncompromising work, go out of your way to find this film. It's a little wonky technically and there are perhaps 5 minutes or so of didactic twaddle one wishes the director has discarded in the cutting room- but none of this diminishes from the towering overall achievement.

For anyone whose taste runs to the safe and predictable and who doesn't like being provoked by the films they watch, avoid this one. It's not for you.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
Categories do not suffice, 17 March 1999

Author: SM-4 from Alabama, US

A Question of Silence is a moving film about three women who commit a horrible, violent crime and about the establishment's attempts to understand their motive. Without forethought and without knowing one another, they attack and kill a boutique owner in cold blood. The film follows the psychiatrist (played by Cox Habbema) as she interviews the incarcerated women. The major conflict comes from the women's refusal to state their motive, whence the title. Everyone assumes they must be insane, because to admit otherwise (and this is the conclusion to which the psychiatrist finally comes) is to admit that the world is a very bad place for women, indeed.

The film is hard to watch, especially, I would imagine, for men. But it by no means glorifies the murder or the murderers. Nor do the murderers find "overwhelming public support" at their trial. What they find is willful incomprehension on the part of the men who arrest them, try them and testify against them. Because what they have done cannot be understood in the context of any existing cultural system, including language, the women can only laugh as their sentence is pronounced. Their laughter is frightening, irrational and yet somehow gives shape to a different kind of logic.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Totemic Feminist Film, 20 April 2006

Author: Jo_UK from United Kingdom

This film captivated me when I first viewed it 10 years ago and continues to do so. It captured the sense of living in a hostile world, evident to any feminist or woman who has suffered at the hands of patriarchy, the system, 'the man' or possibly even the US 'just us' system.

It makes obvious the masculinist basis of language and the inability of some women to describe their experience of oppression within social systems that utilize languages designed and created to express the dominant position.

This film is powerful, and in my experience, confuses only those that have no empathy with the experiences of any of the main characters; namely men.

Comments like those of Brian-343 quoted below miss the moral statement of the film, that patriarchal systems of dominance are SO destructive to some that it literally drives them to insanity (backed up by medical evidence of rates of mental illness in women only being equalled by those of men in times of extreme stress and distress: wartime).

'Did it seem like they answered the question why they did it? I didn't think so. I was left with a weak canned answer. It was just "they were oppressed by the patriarchal society, so they have a reason to kill." What? Do you kill a person based on your whim just because that person is a part of a group of people who "generally" oppresses you? I think the filmmaker failed to make her big moral statement - you don't excuse a criminal instantly because they were supposedly oppressed.'

The film doesn't excuse the murder. It demonstrates the reasons for it. The female protagonists do not escape punishment although Gorris does posit incarceration as preferable to their previous existences; marriage or servitude.

It is a crying shame that this film has not been transcribed onto DVD.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
A Study of Rage and Silence, 16 March 2002
Author: hcheu from Sudbury, Canada

The misunderstanding of this controversial film often comes from the misconception that feminism hates men. The plot of three women killing a man in a boutique is indeed based on an actual event (although the victim in the news was a young woman). In this film, Marleen Gorris studies the extreme behaviour, relating it to the male-dominant legal system that does not give much room for studying people's feelings. If one can see that Gorris' position is more with the pyschiatrist who is sympathetic with the case rather than promoting hatred, it is not hard to see why Los Angeles Times considered the film as a subversive movie in the best sense of the word.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
The right question, 20 October 2001

Author: kjk-2 from San Francisco, CA

Brilliantly posed, the Question of Silence found it's way into US theatres at a very appropriate moment.(1983) The lack of response in the US to this film revealed, to women who had worked through the agonies of trying to get men to "see" something other than their own vain point of view, the dense, monolithic proportion of hate and ignorance for women that most men men hold. The fact that the women characters consciously acknowledged the sense of humiliation that drove them to the rage that enabled them eviscerate the entrenched, historically priggish and stupid Man (the Shopkeeper) that they had endured through their own lives (and the lives of all women before them)made the POV in this film mind-boggling to most viewers. The arguments between the two lawyers (couple) and the disbelief of the Judges further proved the accuracy of the film's "take" on attitudes of men. Men who were in the Lumiere theatre when I saw it left mumbling to themselves. This film jolts people out of their ordinary positions on matters of conscience and action. In that respect alone, it is art of the best kind, the kind that stimulates the viewer to think anew. Not unlike Vagina Monologues in its power to shift awareness, this jewel should be kept in the public's eye by any means necessary.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
This is a film about power, domination and oppression., 6 May 2000
Author: Adam Fischer from Washington, DC, USA

To call this movie hate literature is one thing, but the analogy used referencing Jews and Nazis is completely not applicable here. This is a film about power, domination, and oppression, all three of which men exercise over women in our society. One would have to live in a bubble to say that Jews hold the same position over non-Jews or Nazis (or did pre-WWII)! As a Jew, I find your comment mildly offensive, and as a man (while it is always difficult to recognize one's privilege), I find this film to be an amazing critique of patriarchy. While murder may not be the solution, this film shows the extraordinary way in which 3 women who have been beaten down their whole lives (and have nothing to lose) attempt to fight back against an enemy that is unbeatable. The laughter at the end of this film proves just who gets it and who doesn't. PS- I've heard that in some places during the initial screenings of this film, women in the theaters actually broke out in laughter with the women on screen during the court scene....

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Excellent film, 27 March 1999

Author: kyrat from CA, USA

Shows the societal forces that drive 3 women who have never met to kill a shopkeeper who takes on the personification of condescending patriarchy. Shows the tribulations of the stay at home mom, the waitress & the executive. Shows in subtle & overt ways the pervasive sexism in society.

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4 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Awful movie, 4 December 2005

Author: SeethesignS from Canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Why do feminist films always have to be so immature? It's like watching a movie made by a child, everything is so black and white. As if being a woman automatically made you completely good and right, and being a man meant you were a dim-witted idiot or a savage rapist with no regards at all towards women or even human life.

Who in their right minds would think that the three women from the movie proved they were right to kill that man simply because they broke into hysteric, cold laughter at the end. You could even interpret this movie as being in favor of killing men. I think the feminist movement goes too far sometimes. If it were three men who killed a women and then laughed about it, the movie would have been considered sick and nihilistic, but because they are women somehow they have a right to commit murder.

Such scenes as when a man drives by and asks one of the three women how much she charges are simply ridiculous. And then the woman has the lack of decency to accept the man's money and have sex with him, before laughing in his face in a superior fashion. What does this mean? Does Marleen Gorris actually think she proved a point? Or that scene were the woman lawyer walks down the street, trying to understand why the women killed that man in the store, and bumps into a man who, out of nowhere, yells "Watch where you're going, you c**t!" I mean, how convenient is that? Right when she's thinking of why men deserve to die, some guy just walks into the movie with a sexist insult. I was amazed that Marleen Gorris thought she could get away with something so insulting to our collective intelligence, and I was even more stunned when I heard she did, and that A Question of Silence began for her a career that would eventually win her an Oscar for Antonia's Line.

The movie doesn't even try to justify itself, or to present the subject from a male's point of view; therefore, it is pretentious and self-condescending, and the only people I can think of who could enjoy it are feminists who believe so hard in their cause they won't admit how narrow-minded this movie or themselves are. I'm not insecure or misogynistic at all, but as a man, I was offended that a movie so idiotic could not only be allowed to be produced, but could be considered intelligent and become successful. It certainly doesn't honor the feminist cause or show women in a favorable light.

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Slap in the face to feminism, 16 April 2008
Author: gnrbonjovi8793 from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

As a woman, i actually find this movie offensive. Not only does it portray women as emotional to a fault, it also makes women seem wholly illogical! The laughing at the end only proves this. The prosecutor asks for a motive from the psychiatrist, who's job it is to determine these things, and the women act as if they have lost their minds! More importantly, the entire movie sets up a straw-man argument. If feminism is about equality of the sexes, this movie failed miserably. The only male character in the film that is portrayed as "somewhat" good is the psychiatrist's husband (though you could tell they were trying to make him "bad" as well!). How is this an critique on life? Are you telling me that all men are bad and all women are justified in their disgust? Well, why not ask why these women were disgusted? Were their relationships with men not their own choice? Or are we to assume 1981 in the Netherlands was a time of arranged marriages and no way from women to get an education? Doubtful.

By trying to "empower" women with an image of undue, irrational, and absurd violent attack on an innocent person does not seem like an image i want for women. A man can't win for losing. This movie "empowers" women through violence while the big wigs in the feminist movement are hailing women as too smart to give into violence. Which is it? Or are were really going to beat men into the ground until there's nothing left?

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