A Question of Silence

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....

Reminiscent of the play/short story/film, A Jury of her Peers, written by Susan Gaskel-a contemporary of Eugene O'Neill's who was way more popular than O'Neill at the time, much to O'Neill's dismay.

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.

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.

After watching this film, I was forced to come search for what others had taken from it. I was shocked and jarred, however, at the heteroglossia present. SM-4 from Alabama wrote that, "Everyone assumes they must be insane, because to admit otherwise is to admit that the world is a very bad place for women, indeed." While it may be possible to interpret the film in this way and it may even be the intended interpretation, it strikes me as disingenuous. Though the court and justice system's appearing inability to imagine these women as competent is a form of sexism, it does not point to a "world (that) is a very bad place for women." Indeed, three white men not too long ago in America might have met in a store with a black man and beat him to death. According to SM-4's logic, the world would be a very bad place for white men also.

Just because one racial group, religious group, or gender strikes out at those whom they feel oppressed, threatened, or harmed by, that does not prove that those feeling of oppression, injury, or injustice are valid. In some cases, mitigating evidence may exist. In A Question of Silence, however, I found none.