Speaking Is Difficult - January 2016

The scouts

Schnack turns the essay film into something genuinely unsettling—resisting the urge to resolve or comfort, just letting difficulty sit there like an open wound. It's the kind of provocation most festivals would soften, which is exactly why it works.

A formally rigorous meditation on silence and articulation that locates itself squarely in the essay film tradition while refusing its consolations; the architecture of constraint becomes the subject itself, each cut and pause a considered argument about what speech can and cannot do.

The choice to let dead air breathe—to never rush past the moments when language fails—is what separates this from a hundred other introspective documentaries; one structural decision that transforms discomfort into necessity.

Reviews

AJ Schnack’s first film for Field of Vision is Speaking Is Difficult, in which he dispatched 20 cinematographers to locations where mass shootings have recently occurred in the United States. The landscape portraits in his film form a canvas of a country in which mass violence continues to increase