Silence is a Virtue: Dr Plonk and Passio

Tom Redwood looks at two contemporary Australian silent films – Rolf de Heer's Dr Plonk and Paolo Cherchi Usai's Passio. De Heer's film adheres to the slapstick tradition yet its subject is the end of the world; Usai's film is an arrangement of of archival footage from the earliest years of cinema that aims to forge a dialogue between music, image and text.