Silhouettes

A silhouette strips away everything that makes us three-dimensional, yet somehow still carries something unmistakably true.

A while back, I watched the movie Monkey Man and documentary The Mission back-to-back, I found myself connecting them through an unexpected visual thread.

Monkey Man is in the same action-revenge genre as John Wick, but what sets it apart is its setting in India. The cinematography really plays into it, using the lush colours and scenes filled with a visceral sense of smell: dust and smoke, spices and perfume. One sequence is shot almost entirely in silhouette, and it really grabbed me. A good actor brings tonality, structure, and three-dimensionality to a character, yet all of that gets stripped away in a silhouette shot. What remains is shape and outline, and somehow that's enough. The character still lives in it. There's also a puppetry sequence that pushed the same thought further – this ancient art form built entirely from silhouettes, capable of extraordinary detail and dimension through a completely flat, monochromatic language.

The Mission took the idea somewhere else entirely. The documentary follows a missionary who travelled to North Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago and was killed by the Sentinelese people shortly after landing. The Indian government has long mandated no contact with the island – the Sentinelese don't seek contact either, don't venture beyond their own waters, and don't invite visitors. What we have of them, as a result, is almost nothing: a handful of zoomed photographs taken from a distance, figures on a beach. Silhouettes on white coral sand.

There is a real inability to describe these as three-dimensional beings. No one knows their names, their culture, what they value or prize. And yet they're clearly people – full and complex lives being lived just out of reach. What we have are these framed shapes, stark against the sand, and that's it.

The connection between the two films clicked into something broader. A silhouette isn't just a visual technique – it's a way of thinking about how we project ourselves, how we're seen, and what we choose to show. We create different silhouettes depending on the medium, the context, the light in which we find ourselves. In some cases the shadow is soft, just a slight blur around the edges – things are visible, but softened, not quite fully real. In other contexts, the shadow is crisp and stark, high definition against its background.

What's interesting is that those silhouettes are still us. They follow the same curves of our bodies. Some bits stick out further than we'd like; others complement us, flattening out the lines and signs of wear. They're roughly our size, our shape, but we can distort them – changing the angle of the light and the plane we project onto, we can appear bigger, taller, tougher than we are in life. The silhouette doesn't show the whites of our eyes, the softness of our palms, our underbelly. It withholds the details that make us vulnerable. But it doesn't stop being us. The representation is still ours, still shaped by us, still carrying something true yet hiding aspects that would make us fully known.

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