I posted a couple of weeks ago about a scene from the film Wait Until Dark that effectively moved the story forward and revealed a big story moment without using dialogue. I posted portions of it on some of my group message boards on LinkedIn, and received some interesting comments as feedback. Some people mentioned scenes from other films that had similar affects, and others mentioned entire films that were dialogue free.

But there was one comment that particularly got my attention. He basically said that we were talking about silent movies and seemed to pine for the time when witty dialogue was what we remembered about films. He then went on to say that even though he hadn’t seen “The Artist”, he had heard from friends that they were bored silly merely halfway through the film and that intellectual stimulation was apparently not enough. I replied to his comment by saying that he should see the film himself before passing judgment on it, and that, while I felt that it did drag some over the second half and that I probably would have voted for “Moneyball” or for “The Descendants” for Best Picture, I still felt that “The Artist” was an engaging and entertaining film. He replied back that seeing it would be like eating spinach, and that it was another case of the emperor’s new clothes, what ever that means.

Another point I made in my response was that I was not advocating for silent films, or for films without dialogue.

Regular readers of this blog certainly know of my fondness for good dialogue through my Movie Quote entries. Plus, in order for the scene that I was talking about to work, they had to set up the circumstances a couple of scenes earlier with… you guessed it, dialogue! So please don’t think that through that previous post that I am anti-dialogue, or that I long for the nostalgic days of silent films.  My overall point was that storytelling, especially for important scenes is much more effective when it’s shown rather than told. Seeing something first hand will always have more impact than hearing about it later. That’s the difference between showing an audience what’s happening through action rather than telling them through dialogue. But dialogue, especially well written dialogue, will always have its place and play an important role in the telling of cinematic stories. Just remember that with dialogue, less is more.