Telling A Story With Little Dialogue
Recently I was thinking about television and to a lesser extent, movies, that accomplish a lot without the use of dialogue (or with sparing amounts of dialogue).
I’ve focussed this list more on television because I’m unfamiliar with many of the examples in film, apart from having watched movies from the silent era which is a similar but a different beast as in the silent era the difference in story telling, editing, understanding that film is its own medium and not just recording a stage play are all noticeable.
Here are I think four quality examples from television of telling a good story with little to no dialogue.
1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Hush”.
The earliest of these four. This episode does an amazing job of mixing horror, humor, and heart, the things that made Buffy a great show to watch and doing it all with very little dialogue. The Gentlemen are monsters that have come to Sunnydale out of a fairytale to steal the voices of the town so that they can carryout a series of grisly ritual slayings. The peoples’s voices stolen the characters find ways to communicate as the writers explore the theme that at times our own language gets in the way of communicating the truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32L_Mq4KbEo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfNuMWO128
2. Game of Throne “The Winds of Winter”
The last episode of Season 6 as things are brought to a head with Cersei about to be brought to trial by the High Sparrow, but she has other plans. This story is told almost entirely with visuals and the excellent score by Ramin Djawadi (I bought the sheet music for this season because of the score in this episode, which I ended up doing again for the final season because of the score for “The Long Night”). The use of music, action, and the limited portions of dialogue are so well done and moving it’s something that should be studied the same way that people who are serious about story telling should watch classical endeavors such as opera or ballet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS-gbqbVd8c
3. Legion
There are numerous episodes of Legion which would qualify, but really the entire series is worthy of this purpose. The show utilizes trippy visuals, clever editing, great music choices, and amazing imagination to tell a story of complex characters and to trust its audience to follow along. One of my favorite things was using a dance off between two characters to help the audience visualize a psychic combat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84ja5ehgpCA
4. Twin Peaks, particularly Part Eight of Season Three
Twin Peaks is another fabulously imaginative show that throughout the series uses strange visuals and sound to portray things that are very difficult to describe in words. Season Three in particular seemed to take this up in droves. Part Eight of that season, the “Got a light” episode, is a prime example. Here we get a sense of sheer horror, the evil unleashed by the atomic blast, the creepiness of the woodsman, and it’s all delivered through these tonal abstract means, instead of deliberately explaining the horror to us, and so the effect is so much more intense.
