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Moonlight Film Analysis

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Barry Jenkins’s 2016 film, Moonlight, is a work that is characterized by its silences, both in what is unsaid, as well as the unresolved nature of many of its central tensions. In the film, silence functions to emphasize the interiority of the film’s subject, and to make the audience aware of itself. Such strategic use of absence recalls John Cage's groundbreaking composition, 4'33; a work that is distinguished by its lack of any audible musical accompaniment. For many, the piece is reflective of Cage's sexual identity as a gay man; the silence functioning as a metaphor for the “closet” (Katz 241). The scholar Jonathan Katz has pushed against such a totalizing reading of Cage's oeuvre, by noting that silence was part of his larger aesthetic and religious practices, and thusly cannot be considered as simply an aural manifestation of the closet (242). Katz argues that, "Silence was much more than conventionally unmusical; it provided a route toward an active challenge of the assumptions and prejudices that gave rise to homophobic oppression in the first place. For Cage, silence was an ideal form of resistance, carefully attuned to the requirements of the cold war consensus, at least in its originary social-historical context." (241).
The idea of silence as a mode of resistance is also observed in Evelynn M. Hammond's "Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence". According to Hammonds, historically, Black women sought to counter the negative

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