What Is the Image of Silence?

What is the sound of grief? For me, grief has no sound but silence. The question then changes: what is the image of silence? Godard, quoting Jules Renard, answered that silence is snow falling on water. A second image returned to me from Iranian cinema: a moment in Marva Nabili's Sealed Soil, where a woman lying among the bushes of a remote village slowly wakes under the rain and begins to undress.

The video sets these two images side by side. The snow appears first; the Nabili fragment then appears beside it, and the two run on together to the end. The fragment appears colour-shifted, bluish — not as the film looks, but as it is remembered. No sound has been removed — the rain remains audible.