Silence Is Golden: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|'''Art Spiegelman''': Samuel Beckett once said: "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness".
'''Pavel''': Yes
[A [[Beat Panel]]]
'''Art Spiegelman''': On the other hand, he SAID it.
|''[[Maus]]''}}
While some people have difficulty imagining movies without spoken dialogue, [[Silent Age of Hollywood|the first few decades of film]] did extremely well without it, to the point that many filmmakers dismissed talkies as a [[It Will Never Catch On|gimmicky passing fad]] or a [[They Changed It, Now It Sucks|perversion of real cinema]]. To be honest, they initially had a point considering that film sound recording techniques were very crude in the beginning, making for some really stiffly staged and dull films until the combined talents of artists and technicians solved the problems. Regardless, perhaps it isn't such a shock to learn that, long after the end of the silent film era, many filmmakers and writers still think that silence is, well, golden.
Moreover, sound in art is actually a relatively recent innovation; very few old paintings come with any words attached to them other than the title. Even performance art has often relied more heavily on body language and visual expression than on spoken words. If the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is to be believed, shouldn't a whole series of pictures be able to speak for themselves? Silence in art has a long and distinguished history behind it.
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== Anime and Manga ==
* Mamoru Oshii's ''[[Angel's Egg]]'' has less than a page of spoken dialogue, most of which is in one scene.
* The surreal short film ''[[Cat Soup]]'' has no dialogue whatsoever.
* ''[[Interstella 5555]]: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem'', set to the songs of the [[Daft Punk]] album ''Discovery'', has no need for dialogue either. Even the sound effects are minimal.
* ''[[Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou]]'' actually needs a very high silence-to-dialog ratio to achieve its mellow, contemplative tone.
* The first episode of ''[[Texhnolyze]]'' has approximately ten lines of dialogue, all in a couple of scenes. While the rest of the series is more talkative, it's not uncommon to have several minutes without spoken dialogue in many episodes. The main protagonist Ichise is an extremely quiet man, who often lets others, including Ran, a girl only slightly less silent than him talk in his stead.
* Only two segments in ''[[Robot Carnival]]'' featured any dialogue. And it even had a Shonen and Shoujo segment that managed to be completely coherent despite this.
* ''[[Gon]]'', fitting of a series staring a not-very-anthropomorphic dinosaur, has no dialogue.
* Puchi EVA has no dialogue whatsoever.
* In the Japanese ''[[Akira]]'', the gigantic explosion at the end has organ music playing over it, but in the American dub, soft vocals are playing over the explosion. The noise of the explosion is absent in both.
* Impressively featured in ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]''. Of particular note is the infamous scene in [http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Site/ThumbnailEvangelion24 episode 24] that is nothing but one frame [[Leave the Camera Running|held for a minute and a half]] with [[Ludwig Van Beethoven|Beethoven]] playing over it.
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** Carl Dreyer's ''Vampyr'' is another almost silent early sound film.
* ''<nowiki>[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]</nowiki>'' is 141 minutes long, but there's only forty of them where anyone says anything.
* The ending of Franco Zefferelli's version of [[Romeo and Juliet]] had very little in the way of dialogue compared to the original text's ending.
* [[Sergio Leone]]'s movies were usually very sparse dialogue-wise, letting the visuals and Ennio Morricone's music tell the story instead.
** ''[[The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly]]'' is a good example; the film runs ten minutes before anybody speaks.
*** Also, in the final climactic three way duel, there is no dialogue at all for over five minutes, and the film relies entirely on the score, and closeups of the three main character's faces, each trying decide whether to move first. It is widely considered to be one of the most dramatic moments in film history.
* Mel Brooks' ''[[Silent Movie (film)|Silent Movie]]'', of course. The only spoken word in the entire movie is said by [[Irony|mime Marcel Marceau]].
* In addition to being in [[Deliberately Monochrome|black-and-white]], ''[[Eraserhead]]'' has very little music and keeps the dialogue to the barest minimum, while even the tiniest background noises are unusually audible, enhancing the eerie, nightmarish quality of the movie.
* ''The Call Of Cthulhu'', based on the 1926 [[H.P. Lovecraft]] classic, which was [[Retraux|intended to look it could've been made around the time that the original story was written]].
* E. Elias Merhige's ''Begotten'' is completely silent.
* An afficionado of silent films, Guy Maddin has made several himself, including ''Brand Upon the Brain!'' and ''Cowards Bend the Knee''.
* The [[Deliberately Monochrome|black-and-white]] Japanese [[Body Horror]] film ''[[Tetsuo:
* The 1973 experimental film ''Themroc'' features no intelligible dialogue, but plenty of gibberish, screaming, and grunting.
* ''[[Conan the Barbarian]]'' has a deliberately sparse script to let the exquisite music do the talking. A wise move.
* [[Charlie Chaplin]]'s first two sound films, ''[[City Lights]]'' and ''[[Modern Times]]'', were essentially silent films with recorded soundtracks. The latter only had dialogue that came from either recordings or loudspeakers (i.e., not natural speech), Chaplin's way of [[Painting the Fourth Wall|pointing out what he felt was the artificiality of sound film]].
** Chaplin himself never did a "Talkie" until ''[[The Great Dictator]]'', and even then then, there are long segments of silent comedy
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* The Hungarian film ''[[wikipedia:Hukkle|Hukkle]]'' has almost no dialogue, apart from a song at the end.
* The "sound" work of director Tod Browning is punctuated by extended scenes of silence and visual expressionism. By the time he did ''[[Freaks]]'' he figured out how to do this without resorting to the minimalistically stylized dialogue he used in [[Dracula]].
* ''[[Vase
* Compared to some of his other incarnations who [[Talking Is a Free Action|just won't shut up]]; Bumblebee in the [[Transformers Film Series]] is a mute who uses the radio of his car form to communicate (by playing songs and broadcasting messages that fit his intentions).
* In the classic French film ''Mr. Hulot's Holiday'', spoken dialogue is mostly limited to the role of background sounds.
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== Music ==
* Yes, it's even been done in music: John Cage's 4'33''.
* Type O Negative's The Misinterpretation of Silence and its Disastrous Consequences and the remix The Misinterpretation of Silence and Its Disastrous Consequences (Wombs and Tombs mix)
* This trope is part of the appeal of [[Stop and Go]].
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
* ''[[For Better or For Worse]]'' mimes its dialogue in some of the more comedic Sunday strips. The effect is oddly like a [[Charlie Chaplin]] movie in comic-strip form.
* ''[http://www.gocomics.com/boundandgagged/ Bound and Gagged]'' originally started with this premise: no dialogue, just pictures. As the strip went on, however, the author apparently wasn't able to keep coming up with these silent gags as it features more of the "audible" kind now.
* As seen above, several ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'' strips have been run silent this way.
** In one case Bill Watterson ran several consecutive strips silent this way featuring Calvin growing bigger and bigger. In one of his anthologies, he later explained that he wanted to keep doing this for a month and "see how long readers would put up with it." He ultimately decided to stop after two weeks, ending the last strip with a little dialogue as a punchline.
* ''[[Lio]]'' is one of the only (and possibly ''the'' only) newspaper comics to do this consistently. Every once in a while, writing from a notebook or letter will show up in a panel, but actual speech is mimed. Presumably, words distract from the [[Nightmare Fuel]].
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== Theater ==
* The majority of [[Cirque Du Soleil]] shows, especially the earlier ones, have little or no dialogue. If the characters talk at all, usually they are [[Speaking Simlish]] or a non-English language. The background songs are much the same.
* [[Ballet]] is always wordless. In place of speech, there's a language in the precise miming motions of the dancers.
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* Many ''[[Myst]]''-style games are like this. You get a short speech in the prologue or opening scene, the occasional bit of dialogue when you encounter another character ... and most of the game is just exploring and playing with objects.
* [[Interactive Fiction]] takes this to the logical extreme: no graphics, no sound. Not only is the gameplay silent, the story often is too, because it's a pain to program NPCs who can talk and most creators don't bother to include descriptions of the auditory environment (more's the pity). With a typical parser, you can "say [dialogue]" if you wish, but you'll get no response.
* The story of Subspace Emissary mode of ''[[Super Smash Bros.]]. Brawl'' is told entirely without dialog (disregarding [[Calling Your Attacks]]). The only time anyone speaks is when Snake breaks the fourth wall. Once.
* The Caveman arc of ''[[Live a Live]]''. [[Justified Trope|Justified]] in the fact that language hasn't been invented yet.
* ''[[Another World (video game)|Another World]]'' is another game which uses dialogue-free cutscenes to tell its story.
* Everyone in ''[[Limbo]]'' are rather silent, unless they happen to be animals.
* ''[[Yume Nikki]]'' is also dialogue-free. Needless to say, this is a contributing factor to the staggering amount of [[Wild Mass Guessing]] it's become infamous for.
* There are no spoken lines in the first ''[[Metroid Prime]]'' series (besides a computer saying, "WARNING: SELF DESTRUCT ACTIVATED".) The [[Scenery Porn|beautiful environments of Talon IV]] show you the story of the fallen Chozo civilization, and there are plenty of [[Apocalyptic Log|written logs lying around in case you couldn't figure it out yourself.]] Samus is quiet, but you can tell she's thinking ''something''.
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== Webcomics ==
* ''[[Coffin Comics]]'' has many examples of this, especially in the earlier comics.
* ''[[What's Shakin']]'' does this as the final page in every issue. Some panoramic panels in some pages do this as well.
* ''[[The Intrepid Girlbot]]'' has only ever had dialog in a [https://web.archive.org/web/20111201205637/http://www.intrepidgirlbot.com/images/site/extras/xtracomic_littlemissmechanical.jpg one-shot strip involving Nikola Tesla].
** Lately, there have been [https://web.archive.org/web/20120716042613/http://www.intrepidgirlbot.com/2011/10/14/the-prestige/ a couple] [https://web.archive.org/web/20140405002322/http://www.intrepidgirlbot.com/2011/10/18/prototypical/ of snippets] of speech, but only incidentally.
* The earlier strips of ''[[Nerf Now]]'' were mostly silent, largely because the creator speaks English as a second language.
* ''[[The Princess and the Giant]]'' A silent fairy tale.
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== Western Animation ==
* Quite a few classic cartoons (such as ''[[Tom and Jerry|Tom & Jerry]]'') featured non-verbal characters, focusing on visual gags and slapstick humor. See the [[Mime-and-Music-Only Cartoon]] page.
** The original ''[[One Froggy Evening]]'' is another famous classic cartoon example. It's considered the ''[[Citizen Kane]]'' of animated shorts.
* ''[[Fantasia]]'', being a collection of short animated films set to classical music, had no need for dialogue.
** Ditto its follow-up ''Fantasia/2000''.
* [[Disney]]'s ''[[The Little Match Girl]]'' 2006 short.
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* The final fight between [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Azula and Zuko]] has shades of this. When we cut from one scene to the ongoing fight in the Imperial City, all we see is waves of blue and yellow/red flames being fired through the by now scorched city. The sound effects of only the fire and the Soundtrack -aptly titled '''the Last Agni-Kai'''- make the scene all the more potent.
* In the ''[[Fairly Oddparents]]'' episode where Timmy wishes for quiet, there is no in-universe sound at all, but [[Mickey Mousing|music accompanies every single moment of the "silence".]] Actually extremely well done.
* Utilized in the ''[[
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Silence Tropes]]
[[Category:Film Tropes]]
[[Category:Silence Is Golden]]▼
[[Category:Retro Tropes]]
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