When you say nothing at all

This article scrutinizes the use of the silent gaze and its surrounding context in Costa Rican director Hilda Hidalgo’s film adaptation (2009) of Gabriel García Márquez’s Del amor y otros demonios [‘Of Love and Other Demons’] (1994). Despite similarities in plot from novel to film, Hidalgo’s frequent employment of the silent gaze among the female characters draws from the source text’s lack of dialogue and occasional loose details to create a space for the voices and concerns of Latin American and Caribbean women not present in the novel. In this way, the technique reveals a richly feminist commentary that underscores women’s unconscious desire for feminine influences, bonding experiences, unity and personal agency through the act of observing one another.