Subtitle-Cue Density, Silence, and Female Existential Positioning in Autumn Sonataand Les Rendez-vous d’Anna: A Reproducible Mixed-Methods Study

Two films released in the same year, 1978, offer a starkly different look at how women experience their lives, their families, and their own voices. One, Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata, traps a mother and daughter in a single house, where their relationship is hammered out through intense, non-stop conversation. The other, Chantal Akerman's Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, follows a woman as she moves through hotels, train stations, and temporary rooms, often listening to others while saying very little herself. For decades, film scholars have debated what these differences mean: does staying in one place and talking endlessly represent a form of suffering, while moving and remaining silent represent freedom? This question sits at the heart of a new study that asks whether we can use the tools of modern data analysis to see these patterns more clearly, without losing the emotional truth of the movies.

The researchers, working in the field of digital humanities, wanted to move beyond simply describing these films with words. They sought a way to measure the rhythm of speech and silence in a reproducible, objective manner. To do this, they turned to subtitle files—the text that appears at the bottom of the screen to translate or transcribe dialogue. While subtitles are not perfect recordings of every sound, they provide a reliable map of when words are spoken. By counting how often these text cues appear, the team could create a timeline of verbal activity. They focused on two specific concepts often used in film theory: "martyrdom," which describes a person who stays in a painful relationship and keeps trying to fix it, and "nomadism," which describes a person who maintains their identity by moving and refusing to settle down. The goal was to see if the data supported the idea that one film is defined by constant speech and the other by constant movement and silence.

To make a fair comparison, the researchers could not simply look at the entire length of both movies, as they run for different amounts of time. Instead, they focused on the first 75 minutes of each film, a shared window where both stories were unfolding. They broke this time into five equal segments of 15 minutes each and counted the number of subtitle cues in every segment. The results revealed a striking difference in the texture of these two worlds. In Autumn Sonata, the subtitles appeared with almost machine-like regularity. The film contained 865 separate cues in that 75-minute window, averaging about 11.5 cues every minute. More importantly, this rate barely changed from one segment to the next; the density of speech was steady and unyielding, creating a relentless atmosphere of verbal confrontation.

In contrast, Les Rendez-vous d'Anna told a different story. It contained only 443 cues in the same amount of time, averaging just under 6 cues per minute. But the true difference lay in the rhythm. The density of speech in Akerman's film was not steady; it jumped up and down wildly. In some 15-minute blocks, the characters spoke frequently, while in others, they spoke very little. This created a patchwork of verbal presence and absence, reflecting the film's structure of travel and temporary encounters. The data showed that while Bergman's film was consistently dense with language, Akerman's film was defined by its unevenness, with long stretches where the characters moved through space without the anchor of spoken dialogue.

The researchers then looked at the gaps between the subtitles to find moments where the verbal marking disappeared completely. In Autumn Sonata, these gaps were rare and short. When they did occur, such as during a scene where the daughter plays the piano for her mother, the silence was filled with music and intense facial expressions, not a lack of communication. The absence of words here did not mean the characters were disconnected; rather, it highlighted how the film uses speech to judge and control, and how music briefly breaks that cycle before the words return to re-establish the hierarchy. The steady stream of dialogue in the rest of the film showed that the characters were trapped in a cycle of trying to explain themselves to one another, a cycle that never actually resolved their pain.

In Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, the gaps were long and frequent. There were stretches approaching six minutes where no subtitles appeared at all. During these times, the camera followed the protagonist as she walked through hotel corridors, sat on trains, or waited in rooms. The silence here was not a pause in a conversation but a state of being. The character often listened to the stories of strangers or family members without offering her own. This pattern of intermittent speech and long travel intervals supported the idea of "nomadism." The character protected her sense of self by refusing to settle into a fixed role or a permanent home. The data showed that her silence was an active choice, a way of withholding herself from the definitions others tried to impose on her.

The study concludes that these two films do not simply show a woman who talks versus a woman who is silent. Instead, they reveal two different ways of existing in the world. In Autumn Sonata, the constant return to speech mirrors a return to a painful relationship; the characters keep trying to speak their way out of their trauma, only to find that the words keep them bound to the same injuries. In Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, the movement and the variable silence mirror a life of provisionality, where the character stays free by never fully belonging, but pays the price of isolation. The data did not prove that one way is better than the other, but it provided a clear map of how the films use time and language to build these experiences.

Ultimately, this research demonstrates that numbers can help us see the shape of a story without reducing it to a statistic. The study carefully avoided claiming that the subtitle counts measured the characters' feelings directly. Instead, the numbers served as a guide, pointing the viewer to specific moments where the rhythm of the film changes. By combining these measurements with close observation of the images and sounds, the researchers showed that the "martyrdom" of staying and the "nomadism" of moving are not just abstract ideas, but patterns woven into the very fabric of the movies. The findings suggest that while one film uses a steady stream of words to trap its characters in a cycle of repetition, the other uses the gaps between words to let its character drift, offering a different, though equally complex, kind of freedom.