Two goals dovetail in this video essay. The first explores what might be called ‘visually implied sound.’ Viewers are constantly presented with sound-producing objects, agents and events in ‘silent’ films. Even if the accompaniment (live or otherwise) features no ‘actual’ sound to match it, each sound event can be understood intuitively. If sufficiently immersed in watching—‘listening with one’s eyes’—these phantom sounds may even be somehow ‘heard.’ Nevertheless, they have an uncanny quality of palpable absence. Despite not existing for anyone not watching the screen, they are nevertheless simultaneously ‘inside’ the mind of each viewer, but also somehow shared between them. The repetitive hammer-blows throughout this video exemplify this effect.

This possibility has been noted—often in passing but occasionally in depth—but no single term for it has gained widespread acceptance, with words used previously (‘subception’ and ‘athorybos’) lacking either a precise and exclusive meaning or an intuitively accessible one (Nasta 1991: 93, 2001: 96; Szaloky 2002; Chion 2017: 60, cf. 1994: 57). As such, following a brief usage by Oliver Sacks (2012: 44; cf. 1989), I have suggested the term ‘phantacusis,’ with the adjective ‘phantacoustic.’ I identify four overlapping ways phantacusis is achieved:

This video particularly foregrounds examples where written words break free from intertitles and invade the surfaces of diegetic reality, acting as vehicle of both sound and meaning.

Given how commonplace the technology of the written word has become, its strangeness is easily overlooked. The sonic content of text is most cinematically apparent in written onomatopoeia, as in the comic-inspired fight scenes of the televisual Batman (ABC, 1966–68), or, in examples from ‘silent’ cinema, conveying the squeaking newness of shoes in True Heart Susie (D.W. Griffith, 1919) or the animated delivery of ‘college yells’ by Harold Lloyd in The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1925). But the written word may introject far more than a sound into the mind of the reader—as evident here, in the obsessive repetitions of the name, “Fe-li-ci-tas,” transposed over hoofbeats and engine sounds in Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926), or the rattling ’33-133’ over glass bottles and a ticking clock in Spies (Fritz Lang, 1928). In such examples, onscreen cinematic text is not a poor substitute for synchronised sound, but something far weirder, with sense and sensation interweaving in the reading of a word.

Encountered phantacoustically, writing thus takes on an embodied quality, representing not merely the sound, but a “metadiegetic” sound—i.e., the sound as it is heard, understood and experienced by a figure onscreen (Gorbman 1987: 22–23). Like the phantacoustic sound that can’t be ‘heard’ by someone with their back to the screen, these ‘sounds’ are indelibly tied to a subjectivity, to the idiosyncratic experience of an individual, despite being shared by anyone watching together.

The actual meaningful content of the sounds encountered as writing here is largely irrelevant (though this video essay admittedly further decontextualizes each example). Though explanations are possible, how many audience members understood the import of the “Tsi Nan Fu” or “Melior” in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Fritz Lang, 1922), even on original release? What does it mean to be told “You Must Become Caligari!”, either on a cinema screen or in the urban environment, through the film’s famous proto-viral poster campaign? Whether a name, a number, a cypher, sigil or shibboleth, these moments convey the overwhelming sense of a message of some great but inarticulate significance, perceived through the strange, quasi-subjective hallucinatory mode of phantacusis.

This leads into the second aim of this video essay, offering one theoretical direction for consideration of the formal device of phantacusis. Those who experience psychosis or schizophrenia describe a peculiar atmosphere descending during its early stages. Sometimes called the ‘Trema’ after a word for stage-fright, this ‘delusional mood’ is rarely represented in media, unlike the more attention-grabbing hallucinations and delusions listed in textbooks of biomedical psychiatry. The individual moving through the Trema seems to deploy an interrogative “truth-taking stare,” scrutinising both the world and their experience of it (Sass 1990: 122). They describe a tremendous sense of anticipation—of an imminent revelation or a significant event, which may never come. Details that seem innocuous or incidental to others take on indefinable but unmistakable significance, an “aberrant salience” (Kapur 2003: 15–16). There is ultimately a sense that there is a message, an imperative addressed to you, with ever-increasing pressure, waiting impatiently to be heard. The images decontextualized and creatively juxtaposed here aim to express this mood, both through and alongside the possibilities of phantacusis.

The sensation of discovering cryptic messages, words everywhere pulsating with ineffable significance, aligns both with the experience of the Trema and that of the “urban uncanny” (Vidler 1994). Appearing here, the environments of modernity see text manifested everywhere—as print media, news, advertising, bureaucracy and other ‘outside’ forces of influence and control. The sense of being ‘addressed,’ even commanded, is common, even if the accompanying sense that one is being personally addressed (“you must …”) belongs to madness and the Trema.

In turning to phantacusis, as a formal device from early twentieth century cinema, to find an idiom to communicate the vast strangeness of psychotic experience, this video essay takes up the prompt of Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism (1992; 1994). It moves from the intense listening pictured in its opening moments—an auditory ‘truth-taking stare’—through the insistent phantacoustic hammer-blows, increasingly filtered through the subjectivity of characters onscreen, to the ultimate eruptions of enigmatic texts, which, for the psychotic individual, shift finally into overwhelming epiphanies and revelatory imperatives. Though they may seem inarticulate or impossible to communicate to others, this video aims to communicate the affective impact of these experiences via its showcase of phantacoustic effects.

Chion, Michel. 2017. Words on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. Columbia University Press.

Kapur, Shitij. 2003. “Psychosis as a State of Aberrant Salience: A Framework Linking Biology, Phenomenology, and Pharmacology in Schizophrenia.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, no. 1, 13-23. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.13.

Nasta, Dominique. 1991. Meaning in Film: Relevant Structures in Soundtrack and Narrative. Peter Lang.

---. 2001. “Setting the Pace of a Heartbeat: The Use of Sound Elements in European Melodramas Before 1915.” In The Sounds of Early Cinema, edited by Richard Abel and Rick Altman, pp. 95–119. Indiana University Press.

Sacks, Oliver. 1989. Seeing Voices. Picador.

---. 2012. Hallucinations. Picador.

Sass, Louis A. 1990. “The Truth-Taking-Stare: A Heideggerian Interpretation of a Schizophrenic World.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 21, no. 2, 121–149. https://doi.org/10.1163/156916290X00029.

---. 1992. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought. Basic Books.

---. 1994. The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind. Cornell University Press.

Szaloky, Melinda. 2002. “Sounding Images in Silent Film: Visual Acoustics in Murnau’s Sunrise.” Cinema Journal, 41, no. 2, 109–131. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225854.

Vidler, Anthony. 1994. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT Press.

Jacob Browne completed his Ph.D. in Film Studies in 2025 at the University of St. Andrews, supported by Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) funding. His thesis examined the visual representation of sounds in silent films (or ‘phantacusis’), with particular attention to the use of this effect to depict hallucinations and other perceptual and psychological phenomena. Previously, he received an M.Phil. in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge, through Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding, and a B.A. in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Oxford.

This video essay is an accomplished and intellectually ambitious project that demonstrates both conceptual depth and formal sensitivity. Its originality lies in the way it approaches questions of cinematic invisibility—experiences that resist representation—through the prism of sound, and more specifically through sound as it is visually implied in silent cinema. By shifting attention from what is shown to what is sensed, anticipated, or mentally constructed, the video essay proposes a distinctive way of thinking about perception at the limits of visibility.

The video essay demonstrates a strong command of the aesthetic resources of silent cinema, particularly through its sustained attention to gesture, rhythmic structures, and the visual inscription of sound-producing actions. These elements are assembled in a way that foregrounds the viewer’s perceptual activity, encouraging an awareness of how sound may be inferred, or internally generated in the absence of synchronized audio. The recurring motifs—most notably the hammer blows—and the carefully modulated pacing contribute to a coherent experiential trajectory, enabling perceptual effects to unfold gradually.

The use of material from silent cinema is especially effective. The video mobilizes the interplay of image, rhythm, and typographic text to explore how meaning emerges through perception itself. Textual inscriptions and visually evoked sounds function as phenomenological events, drawing attention to processes of anticipation and perceptual intensification.

Visually and rhythmically, the video is carefully composed. Its structure sustains an engagement with repetition and variation, inviting the viewer to inhabit an uncanny perceptual field shaped by expectation and suspension. The musical accompaniment contributes to this atmosphere by reinforcing the tension between inner hearing and visual sonority. The result is a montage that is suggestive and attentive to the specificity of cinematic experience.

The accompanying written statement further clarifies the project’s conceptual framework and situates it convincingly within relevant theoretical discussions of sound, perception, and spectatorship. Together with the video essay, it helps articulate the broader stakes of the inquiry and highlights the originality of approaching silent cinema through the lens of visually implied sound, reinforcing the coherence and ambition of the project as a whole.

Overall, this is a thought-provoking and aesthetically refined contribution to videographic criticism. It demonstrates how cinema—especially the ‘silent’ image—can resonate through the most elusive experiences of consciousness.

This video essay reminds us of the way silent cinema represented sounds. It combines images and clips of sound sources with visuals of people hearing and of using writing not just as a signifier of meaning but also as a representation of sonic qualities like volume, tempo, or rhythm. The variety of devices to evoke sound in the heads of the audience is still astonishing as this video essay clearly demonstrates.

The video essay is perfectly crafted and rhythmically edited. The repetition of hammer blows and the recurring shots from the same film reinforce the video essay’s rhythmic structure and deepen its suggestive power.

The video essay is progressing logically from images of hearing to depictions of sound, and finally to voices represented through writing. Overall, this is a beautifully made piece: structurally clear, rhythmically compelling, and highly effective in translating the sensory experience of sound into visual form.

The theoretical questions this video essay implicitly asks concern the evocation of sounds by images. Michel Chion calls them “negative or phantom sounds” (Chion 2019: 181). The author uses the term “phantacusis” for the representation of sounds on screen without a technically synchronized sound.

This is obviously the working basis of silent cinema, although the live creation of appropriate sound in cinemas was not uncommon at a specific time during the first thirty years of film. Typography in silent cinema is still an under-researched topic. This essay demonstrates in less than ten minutes the bandwidth of possibilities silent cinema was experimenting with.

Sound and especially voices were also used to signify psychological states, which this video essay finally emphasizes.

In general: this video essay is a perfectly crafted, rhythmically impressive, clearly structured montage, that motivates us to rethink our notion of sound, typography and the representation of voices without bodies in silent cinema.

Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. 2nd ed. Columbia University Press.

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