The Sound of Silence: Ryan Gosling, Expressionism and the Silent Hero in 21st-Century Film

The Sound of Silence explores how non-verbal communication in film, shown primarily through the acting of Ryan Gosling, provides an expressive space in which passive audience viewing is made more active by removing the expository signifier of dialogue.

The German Expressionist era may have been brief, but the shadows cast since its end nonetheless loom large. The silhouetted, cigar-wielding men of film noir and their respectively dark, doom-laden haunts mirror the angst-inducing atmospheres...