Usually the first assignment you get in film school is to make a silent film. What this teaches aspiring filmmakers is a very important lesson: cinema is the art of moving pictures. If you can't tell a story without words, then your films will be like those made by Kevin Smith: artless. Since the dawn of talking pictures, Americans have been cinematically obsessed with words. Dialogue is the crutch many bad movies rely upon, it's the pen that propels drama, it's an excuse to let words do the talking for you.There's no question European cinema has its share of dialogue heavy crap as well, but there's also a widespread appreciation for films tethered to the art of telling a story with images. One such film is Luc Besson's Le Dernier Combat, a post-apocalyptic, action film of sorts, where not one word of dialogue is spoken for 93 minutes. LDC is an engrossing and fluid film where it is easy to forget words are absent since the imagery is so rich and the story so compelling.
When P.T. Anderson released There Will Be Blood last year a lot of people were amazed the film opened with a 15-minute sequence where not one word of dialogue was spoken. I loved this introduction, but failed to be all that impressed by a mere 15-minutes of silence. Are the films of today so dialogue saturated that 15-minutes worth of people shutting up should be considered a breakthrough? Based on all the crap on TV, the news and what you hear walking down the street, I wish a moratorium would be placed on spoken word...if only to allow us to go back to the basics and learn how to tell visually compelling stories again. The art of shutting up. I like that. I guess it's my turn now.
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