Film

“No dialogue!” I said, aloud. “No dialogue at all!”

Sometimes the absence of dialogue speaks volumes more than the spoken word. The following passage from Mervyn LeRoy’s autobiography, Take One, about a scene from Waterloo Bridge illustrates this point.

One of the key scenes was the one in a nightclub on New Year’s Eve, in which Vivien and Bob were supposed to meet and fall in love. He was leaving the next day for the front. It was a scene that [screenwriter] Behrman, [producer] Franklin and I had spent a lot of time on, and the dialogue between the two was, we had all thought, beautiful and tender. But on the set it just didn’t seem to work too well. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on just what it was.

“I realized at that moment what silent directors had always known, and what I should have known too. Often, in great emotional moments, there are no words. A look, a gesture, a touch can convey much more meaning than spoken sentences. Since sound came in, we have become dependent on it, perhaps overdependent on it.”

At four in the afternoon, after some hours of fruitless fiddling with the scene, I told everybody to go home. I sat there, in that make-believe nightblub, with just one small work light to give me illumination. Over and over, I read the scene, read the words that Sam, Sidney, and I had labored to get right. I was still there at two in the morning, when suddenly the answer came to me.

“No dialogue!” I said, aloud. “No dialogue at all!

I realized at that moment what silent directors had always known, and what I should have known too. Often, in great emotional moments, there are no words. A look, a gesture, a touch can convey much more meaning than spoken sentences. Since sound came in, we have become dependent on it, perhaps overdependent on it. It was time to go back to basic human behavior, and often human beings say nothing. This scene was one of those times when silence was more expressive than dialogue.

© 2008 TIMECODE.