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One minute of silence One Minute of Silence presents both the time of measured silence and the much more incalculable time of the thoughts occupying the minds of a certain number of people during that specific lapse of time. At the crossroads of imposed exterior silence, barely disturbed by the hum of the city, and of an interior noise one does not usually hear, the film invites the spectator to play in diverse ways with this contrast : by clicking on the head of the characters with his mouse, he may cut into the silence, hear the thoughts of one character, intersect them with the thoughts of another, and enter once more into silence… Situation : September 14th 2001, 12 o’clock, the manager of a travel agency brings his staff together on the terrace of the Parisian building to celebrate the minute of silence nationally decreed in memory of the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks. The thoughts of the characters intertwine the occasion uniting them, the constrained feeling they have being there, and the relationships they have with eachother… They are there and they are drifting, they are present and they are far. If the juxtaposed thoughts as a whole provide a certain sociological, critical state of the different positions that can be provoked, on-the-spot, by a politico-mediatic event, they also express the sociological constraints of this type of celebration in the professional world as well as the variations in interior freedom of each character in this context. According to how each spectator constructs his itinerary, One Minute of Silence would like to represent the disjunction between constraint and freedom in the unequal game of content and form : as regards content, it is the imbalance between what is shown (people being silent) and what cannot be represented (thought). Interactivity becomes meaningful in this possibility of installing what is beyond representation, in what is not seen and heard : the other side of silence.
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