The Speaker and the Listener

I recently realized that the way I watch films isn't really about criticism. It's closer to listening. The idea came to me through Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, where a Speaker is neither a eulogist nor a judge, but someone whose task is to tell the truth of a life in its entirety: the failures and the achievements, the wounds and the moments of grace, the misunderstandings, mistakes, and small victories that make a person who they are. The Speaker's responsibility is not to praise or condemn, but simply to bear witness.

As I sat with that thought, I started noticing that certain filmmakers work in exactly this way. Robert Bresson speaks for Balthazar [1]. Mikhail Kalatozov speaks for Enrique [2]. Larisa Shepitko speaks for Mitya [3]. Andrei Tarkovsky speaks for his memories, his family, and ultimately for his own life [4]. Their films differ enormously, style, rhythm, ambition, but underneath that, they share a trust in the lives they present. They don't interrupt the testimony to explain what we should think. They don't force their characters into a moral lesson. They simply present a life, and they trust us to encounter it.

This also changed how I think about the viewer. If some directors are Speakers, then maybe our role isn't judge, prosecutor, or even interpreter. Maybe we are Listeners. The Listener's job isn't to correct the story or reshape it to fit personal beliefs. It's just to hear it. That doesn't mean abandoning criticism entirely; it means approaching a film with the same humility we would bring to another person's life. Before asking whether a life was successful or admirable or happy, we first ask who this person was.

Perhaps this is why certain cinematic images outlive the plots and dialogue around them. Balthazar dying among the sheep, Enrique's funeral in Soy Cuba, the mother sitting on the fence in Mirror, Father Nazario accepting a pineapple [5], these aren't just scenes that symbolize an idea. They feel closer to testimonies. They survive because someone witnessed them, transformed them into cinema, and entrusted them to an audience willing to listen. The filmmaker becomes the Speaker, the viewer becomes the Listener, and the testimony continues past the edges of the film.

This perspective also explains my draw toward damaged, forgotten, or unsuccessful lives. Modern culture tends to measure people by achievement, happiness, or usefulness, but many of the films that move me most seem uninterested in those calculations. Balthazar achieves nothing by ordinary standards. Nancy's suffering [6] doesn't lead to redemption. Mouchette [7] leaves behind no accomplishment for history to record. Yet none of that diminishes the reality of their lives. Their lives don't ask to be weighed against achievement. The simple fact that they were lived is enough to demand our attention.

One of Bresson's greatest achievements in Au Hasard Balthazar is that he forces us into a comparison that first feels absurd. A donkey is not a human being, and the film never pretends otherwise. Yet as Balthazar passes from owner to owner, encountering kindness, indifference, affection, cruelty, a quiet question surfaces: by what measure do we decide that one life matters more than another? The film's power isn't in equating man and animal. It's in stripping away the categories we habitually use to judge human lives. Balthazar has no status, no ambition, no accomplishment. He simply lives and suffers, influences those around him, and dies. By the end, you may find yourself grieving a donkey with the same sincerity you'd offer a human character. Few filmmakers would attempt such a thing. Fewer still could pull it off without sentimentality. Bresson does it with such conviction that the comparison stops feeling strange and starts feeling inevitable.

Death ends a life, but it doesn't erase it. What remains are the traces left in others, the memories carried forward, the stories that continue to be told. In that sense, cinema can become a form of remembrance. As long as there's someone willing to speak and someone willing to listen, the life stays present, resisting the silence that would otherwise swallow it.

This may be why I have so little patience for films that raise their voice and insist on a conclusion. The directors I admire most don't seem anxious about whether I'll arrive at the "correct" interpretation. They trust the testimony. They trust the image. They trust the life they're presenting. Like a Speaker for the Dead, they simply say: here is the story, here is the person, here is what happened. Listen.

[1] Au hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson, 1966
[2] Soy Cuba, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964
[3] Wings, Larisa Shepitko, 1966
[4] The Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975
[5] Nazarín, Luis Buñuel, 1959
[6] Downloading Nancy, Johan Renck, 2008
[7] Mouchette, Robert Bresson, 1967