Void of War: sounds of silence during repatriation and remembrance ceremonies

Reflecting on a tour of the Western Front trenches in 1916 the writer Reginald Farrer suggested that it was in fact wrong to regard the ‘huge, haunted solitude’ of the modern battlefield as empty. ‘It is more’ he argued, ‘full of emptiness… an emptiness that is not really empty at all.’ Contemporary artists, poets, and composers seized upon the concept of a crowded emptiness, of gaps, pauses and silences that were in fact crammed with resonance, populated with overwhelming memory.

This paper and film screening considers the phenomenology of aural emptiness and its manifestation during remembrance and repatriation ceremonies. It focusses on a short film by Kate Davies ‘The Separation Line’ which is a montage of 14 repatriation events held at Royal Wootton Bassett between 2007 and 2011. The film lasts precisely 9 minutes and 50 seconds, which is the temporal length of the town’s High Street, lined on either side by mourners maintaining an unsteady silence.