“When the discotheques are empty and the academies are desolate, the silence of the theatre will be heard again, which is the cause of its languages.” (Heiner Müller)

The silence Heiner Müller speaks of will be heard as breathing in the future. The theatre of the future does not speak. It rather inhales and exhales. It is a theatre of bulging chests. It’s a theatre of pneumatics.

There will have been attempts at this before in the 20th century. Take Peter Handke and his piece THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER. Or the avantgarde of Samuel Beckett with the shortest play, which may call itself thus. Beckett’s absurd 35-second-scene BREATH premiered in the late 60s in New York. We hear the whimper of a baby, an audible in- and exhalation, another cry. These works will be referred to as pneumatic dance.

Just as they lift to speak the actors will be edited out, so that all we see is characters breathing in. In the future, films will be cut precisely in the moment a first sound would have been audible from the mouth. The word will be separated from the body so that only a breath will be heard and seen.

It is an oral breath, not a nasal one.

Only then films will reconnect with themselves in a kind of second revolution since the introduction of the talkies. The films will not be silent however, on the contrary. The audio track will be of great importance. Because while in silent films the lips move and pretend to be able to speak, in the films of the future the actors’ mouths will only open. Thus, the film of the future will not be silent but incredibly eloquent.

At first, one will start work on the classics. Let’s take SOLARIS as an example. They’ll cut out all dialogue and make the film more complete with every cut. Thus only breathing people are left. A close up of the face, the mouth slightly opening. Everything has already been said, and every word lies hidden behind these lips. The pneumatic SOLARIS will thus become a new paradigm. Then all the other films will be cut and therefore become complete. AL DI LÀ DELLE NÙVOLE, a late work of the moribund Michelangelo Antonioni, will get by entirely without dialogue, it will become much better, and much bigger. Only footsteps emerging from the noisy traffic, walking up a large staircase to the door of an apartment, we hear a knock, the sound of a door opening, then the piano. Close-up. The heads of a man and a woman turning to one another. These cuts will at first be referred to as cracks in the word-image-sense, and this necessitates an aesthetics of the breathed word that will have to be written, so that everything, everything can be understood. Of course, films with spoken dialogue will continue to be produced, they will be called B-movies.

Better known as blabla films.

There will be others where captions will be blended in, a lousy attempt to get in between the images, to smuggle the sense of words in between the breaths. Some will try to equate pneumo films with pornography, confusing the wordless moaning, absurd groaning, the lustful panting on display with the breath of pre-meaning. The mouth of pornography is one which must be stuffed, and this closure of openings will have nothing to do with the potentiality of speech, which in principle will remain inconclusive, just like the film in general.

As a result the entire acting profession will change. The mouth that breathes will now be called beautiful. A new notion of rhythm: when will the actor close his mouth again? An entire art of inhalation: soundless, or slowly taking in the air, or done so that the soft palate vibrates and a quiet but audible plosive is heard, or by inhaling the air through trembling lips in order to create a slight wind? These will be the nuances that will count.