Memorable Sequences of Cinematic "Silence" and/or "Ambience"

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Clooney's The American excelled at using non-dialogue/non-music scenes to drive it's suspense. Late in the film, we see Clooney sitting in a cafe with another assassin. She leaves the cafe & he's left wondering what the hell she's doing. Is she waiting to kill him outside? Did she get in a car & leave? His only clues, as well as the audience's, are the ambient sounds that are bouncing around in the electrified silence. This simple technique puts us square in the mind of Clooney, brilliantly tuning us into his fear & paranoia. Oddly, alot of critics didn't really seem to catch the deliberate subtleties of the film & dismissed the movie as dull & arid. Twits.

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Originally Posted by Art Decade 

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Clooney's The American excelled at using non-dialogue/non-music scenes to drive it's suspense. Late in the film, we see Clooney sitting in a cafe with another assassin. She leaves the cafe & he's left wondering what the hell she's doing. Is she waiting to kill him outside? Did she get in a car & leave? His only clues, as well as the audience's, are the ambient sounds that are bouncing around in the electrified silence. This simple technique puts us square in the mind of Clooney, brilliantly tuning us into his fear & paranoia. Oddly, alot of critics didn't really seem to catch the deliberate subtleties of the film & dismissed the movie as dull & arid. Twits.

I was coming in here to post the same thing. The use of silence and background sounds in this film is striking. Really wonderful way to put audiences into the mind of the character

This is the first one I thought of.

The palpably intense "non-dialogue/non-music" silence that peppers the Luke/Vader Bespin duel in ESB is both immensely theatrical & intriguingly atmospheric. The ambient noise of the Bespin station does quite a bit of heavy "world-building", drawing us further into a foreign world of cold & arid mechanica as Luke moves through the alien corridors. At minute 3 in the clip, cutting through the silence as we edge closer to the last duel, we hear two things: Vader's breathing & Luke's respondent unsheathing of his lightsaber. It's a great moment of dynamic storytelling without dialogue or music & Kasdan/Kershner brilliantly sussed the power & drama of that moment through sound.

The first Phantasm movie has some great moments where the deathly silence of the mausoleum, or the constant drone of the [spoiler]space-gate room[/spoiler] really add to the atmosphere.

One of the best moments in the film, combining those elements, is the "High Noon" showdown in the mausoleum itself.

Duh.

What else is there to say?

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Originally Posted by mcnooj82 

ADDENDUM!!!  These moments of silence/ambience don't need to be full on sequences.  Even sweet punctuations of silence will work.  I love those.

Examples?

Dudes. Seriously?

Rififi. Containing the mother of such scenes. If you still haven't watched this masterpiece drop everything and run to correct that mistake. 

Hanks being deafened and disoriented on the beach(and then again at the end) in Saving Private Ryan is a good little short one. I strongly dislike the script for that movie, but most everything else, including the sound work, is aces.

The final shootout in Open Range is a great "minimum dialogue/no music" sequence. The booming sound of gunfire & ricochet against wood is the primary soundtrack for 10 straight minutes.

The swordfights in The Duellists & Rob Roy are great examples of storytelling by the use of nothing but the sounds of clanging swords & exhausted grunting.

Speaking of Ridley Scott, Alien is rife with the use of ambient sound without dialogue to drive the film's action. This is most notable when Ripley sets the ship for self destruct & has to maneuver her way to the escape pod, the alarm system countdown being the primary soundtrack. There's no clip of it but the classic trailer gives a good overview of the phenomenon in action:

In addition to the aforementioned Raffifi, Le Samourai and No Country For Old Men, are the gold standard for long, tense silences and minimalist scores.  The whole sequence when Chigurgh tracks Moss to the hotel leading to the chase in the streets is all the more intense for not having obvious music stings.

In TV, The Wire only used non-diegetic music once a season, and though a lot of viewers probably don't consciously notice it, I think it has as much to do with how "journalistic" the show feels as the meticulous research and local color that went into it.  But the very first thing to jump to my mind was the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "The Body".  The long sequences of silence are very finely constructed on their own (particularly the opening and when Buffy pulls Dawn out of class), but have all the more impact because it is such a stylistic departure for the show, which normally leaned heavily on the score, be it operatic or whimsical, and it's trademark snappy patter, which is cut down to terse, muted exchanges punctuated by brief bouts of in-character hysteria.  It captures the hollow, helpless feeling that follows a sudden death better than a live-action comic book about a hot chick killing monsters has any right to, and that's largely because it stops sounding like a live-action comic book for a week.

There is a scene in The Fountain where Hugh Jackman is walking out of the hospital past a construction site. The volume is turned almost all the way down until he walks in front of a car and the car's horn blares. I love that scene.

One of the first that came to mind is Clooney and Pitt in OCEAN'S ELEVEN, when they're at the bar, discussing the numbers needed for the heist. Clooney does all the talking, but reacts as if Pitt is responding out loud. The use of silence to communicate how well the two know each other is fantastic.

Speaking of Clooney: I second the love for THE AMERICAN's use of silence throughout the film.

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Originally Posted by raptors661 

There is a scene in The Fountain where Hugh Jackman is walking out of the hospital past a construction site. The volume is turned almost all the way down until he walks in front of a car and the car's horn blares. I love that scene.

Isn't this a direct reference to a similar silence from another film? I thought I heard or saw Aronofsky come out and say he pretty much lifted the "deafening silence suddenly blaring into sound" sequence from something else.

From Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. Not a great film, but a particularly great scene especially how it incorporates the Carlos character's deafness into the kill.

Starting around the minute mark...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmx6k3x6OQ

The one that comes to mind is Babel, where Rinko Kyochi (sp?) deaf character is at a nightclub with her friends. We see the club from her POV, lights, dancing, silence. The film cuts in and out of 3rd person and 1st person, jarring the audience with sounds of total sound immersion to a total lack of sound immersion. The movie is eh, but that scene was always pretty cool.

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Originally Posted by MichaelM 

One of the first that came to mind is Clooney and Pitt in OCEAN'S ELEVEN, when they're at the bar, discussing the numbers needed for the heist. Clooney does all the talking, but reacts as if Pitt is responding out loud. The use of silence to communicate how well the two know each other is fantastic.

 

The great thing about that is that it's not like he's nodding or shrugging or Clooney is reading his facial expressions.  Pitt doesn't even look up the whole time.

Final shot, In the Company of Men.

Memorable usage of Cinematic "Silence" and/or "Ambience"?

Holy shite, THIS:

As far as ambient sounds go, the opening of Once Upon A Time In The West comes to mind: water dripping, buzzing fly, windmill squeaking. Then train chugging. Then harmonica. Trouble has arrived!

Couldn't find a clip of it, but another RETURN OF THE KING moment: when Sam and Gollum are dragging Frodo away from the entrance to Minas Morgul, there's a nearly ear-splitting rush of sound, then staggering silence.....then the sickly green shaft of light erupts towards the clouds. 

That silence makes the geyser of sound and light incredibly dreadful. Fantastic sound and visual design by PJ and Weta.

ETA: Found it. It's the latter half of this clip.

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Originally Posted by Judas Booth 

AKIRA. Tetsuo and Kaneda are having their climactic battle. It's very loud. The colonel activates the SOL satellite and things go quiet. ZAP. Also love how it's a silent when Tetsuo flies up into space.

There's another one from that flick I like, where the kids are talking about taking Tetsuo and Akira away into nothingness, their voices drop, and for a few seconds, Kaneda's just floating there, in complete silence, with all these spirals of debris and wreckage around him, which leads into his flashback of Tetsuo. It's a tiny moment, but one of the reasons that ending is so fucking amazing.

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Originally Posted by Justin Clark 

There's another one from that flick I like, where the kids are talking about taking Tetsuo and Akira away into nothingness, their voices drop, and for a few seconds, Kaneda's just floating there, in complete silence, with all these spirals of debris and wreckage around him, which leads into his flashback of Tetsuo. It's a tiny moment, but one of the reasons that ending is so fucking amazing.

...Which reminds me of the opening of 2009's STAR TREK. During the opening sequence, when Nero fires on the Federation vessel, a crew member gets sucked out into space, and there's a really effective moment of silence. 
 

The final shot of Antonioni's The Passenger makes great use of natural ambience:

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Originally Posted by Judas Booth 

Not a movie, but there's an excellent episode of 'The Prisoner' ('Many Happy Returns'? where he wakes up to find the village deserted. There's no dialog for close to 20 minutes and it's riveting.

My God, how could I have forgotten THAT. Utterly riveting. One of my 2 or 3 Top Prisoner episodes. The use of ambient sound is particulaly key to the plot of The Chimes Of Big Ben.

The ending of A, B, & C  contains another great use of silence toward dramatic effect (starts at minute 6.5):

The exact moment of Boromir's death, right after "my captain, my king."  Instead of a swell of score, the everything hushes, even the sounds of the forest, and Aragorn bows his head as this barely-there tone of mourning settles over the scene.  It's like the whole scene holds its breath in that moment.  Beautiful.

For ambiance, it doesn't get much better Lee Marvin walking down that hall in Point Blank. Just his footsteps getting louder and louder, then BAM!

The first minute and twenty seconds of this scene from Road to Perdition:

Just the waves, two gunshots, and the sound of Hanks struggling to move while Law sets up the camera.

I can't find a youtube clip for it, but Cameron's use of silence and ambient noise in the moments leading up to the Ed Harris / Michael Biehn fight in The Abyss is just fantastic.

Once Biehn's crazed navy seal locks himself in the sub bay with the nuclear warhead, Harris is forced to swim through the freezing waters and sneak in via the moon pool.  As Harris slowly pulls himself out of the water and painstakingly makes his way around the room in complete silence, the only sounds you hear are the ambient sounds of the sub bay - little drips of water, Biehn's labored breathing, and the clicking of a chain he's pulling as he rigs up the warhead.  Its slow and deliberate and ends with Biehn spinning around with his pistol drawn at the last second just as Harris finally reaches him.  The sequence is punctuated with the loud CLICK of Biehn's empty sidearm, and then the actual fight begins.  Wonderfully tense edge-of-your-seat filmmaking.

The scene in Jaws when Hooper is lowered, in the cage, down into the water. The music starts to swell for a few seconds as Hooper straightens out his goggles and sees the shark approaching. Then the shark passes by, disappears, and there's complete silence. This completely immerses us in the underwater world, we're there with Hooper, and then BAM! The shark rams into the cage behind Hooper.

Perfect tension builder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW7Q7UySxRA&feature=related