The title doesn’t suffer any fools. This is a howl of cinematic nothingness, a pitilessly impotent roar. It’s a post-noir stripped to the wiry skeleton: no shadows, an open-air prison that hides things in plain sight. Allen Baron is the shaggiest of auteurs, a ramshackle one-man band who directs and writes a doom and then casts himself to wear it. He fashions himself as an icon figure of mid-century social disintegration that is nonetheless entirely integrated into himself, a man who is entirely cohesive, basically complete in himself, and yet essentially a void. He is a performer who is both a presence and an absence, a blank face that registers as an abyss moving through a land without shadows.

Contrast this with Orson Welles’ magisterial The Trial from the same year, the greatest Kafka adaptation in all of cinema. Welles may have been the surest hand and most preternatural eye ever to weaponize a movie camera, and his 1962 film is one of the great cinematic acts of abandonment, a brutal displacement of space-time in which reality folds in on itself as the modernist dream of productive experimentation and creative curiosity eat themselves alive. An amazing film, no doubt, one that formally turns the 20^th century’s Promethean vision of progressive order into its own death spasm. Baron’s much less famous film is, in some sense, more frightening, a hell that masquerades not as the good – with its pretensions of order and stability – but the neutral. Blast of Silence is a film for what Daniel Bell called “the end of ideology”: visions of a better world – visions of the world –  have been discharged, and the characters are all just tenants moving from store to store in the remnants of a world that functions but does nothing more.

There’s nothing grand about Blast of Silence. It promises no withdrawal in the form of utopia, and it promises no exodus in the form of an apocalypse. There’s only a now, a flatline. This is not Welles’s modernist promise interred in its own abstract Kafkaesque geometry – an architecturalization of Charles Foster Kane’s own morbid ego and elephantine charisma – but an essentially banal world. No one in Blast has any plans, least of all those in power. There are no totalitarian overseers enforcing and justifying a state vision. This is a city that needs no excuse to murder. It arrives like a train, “right on schedule.” Murder is a “business.” And Blast of Silence is business-like in its severe austerity, a corrosive and unsettling meditation on modern alienation and spiritual ennui that hits like a bullet. No one here is an ideologue. They’re professionals. That is an ideology, of course, but they don’t need to know that, and they don’t need someone to hide it from them. It feels like the open-casket funeral for the traditional film noir, deflating its romantic fatalism and sinister glamour and exposing an apathetic world, a planar space. There’s nothing in the dark.

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