It always bugs me when filmmakers forget that film is a visual medium, and wind up making movies that could just as easily be stage plays.
Conversely, I really love it when a filmmaker is able to tell a story, or part of a story, using no words at all (or at least very few words).
A couple of my favorites:
The revenge sequence from Rushmore. (Yeah, there are a few words of dialogue at the very end.) (And yeah, maybe this is more of a montage than a “scene.” Quit bustin’ my chops, OK?)
It took the comic book industry some time to figure this out as well. Find some Batman or Superman comic book from the 1940s, and you’ll find the panels loaded with captions describing the action that the artwork is already depicting perfectly clearly. They feel like illustrated transcriptions of radio dramas. Come to think of it, it also took television a while to realize they didn’t need a narrator describing everything.
On the funny side, I have to mention the blind man’s encounter with the dinosaur in Caveman (1981), in fact, as the whole movie dialogue was just grunts and pseudo language one can say that there was no dialogue in the whole movie.
On a serious take on early man, it is hard to find a better scene than the discovery of the first weapon in 2001: A space odyssey.
Cast Away. i have little patience for over-indulgent slow moving movies but this one is extremely compelling, especially for what is basically a one-man show.
The Warriors - That silent scene on the subway where our heroes are beaten and bruised after their ordeal and another group of young people their age with obviously very different lives get on. What a perfect scene, perfect.
One Million Years BC - The whole movie has not one word of dialogue, yet it is one of the most compelling movies I’ve ever seen. Everyone is skeptical about the movie but when they actually watch it their eyes are glued to the screen.
The Black Stallion, the tremendous extended sequence when the shipwrecked kid finds himself washed up on the island, finds the horse, finds a bond growing between the two of them. The rest of the movie was meh, but that part was magic.
A favorite scene. The first two minutes of this clip features Jim Broadbent as W. S. Gilbert conceiving the plot of The Mikado. No words, other than some gibberish noises, and it is one of the few movie scenes I know of where you really see the character thinking.
Almost every film by Michael Mann has at least one long, terrific scene with no dialog (but often distinctive music). The cliff scenefrom *the Last of the Mohicans *(dialog stops at about 1 minute in) is probably the most famous, but there’s also the Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida scene from Manhunter, the bank robbery from Heat, and the jogging scene from Ali.
