Great movie/TV segments with little/no dialogue

[Aquadementia]

@MichaelEmouse

What are some great movie or TV segments that use little or no spoken/written dialogue? What makes them work so well?
As examples, the starting Carl & Ellie love segment in the movie Up or the starting introduction in Wall-E work quite well although I haven’t pinned down why. 2001 Space Odyssey’s first 25 minutes have no dialogue and the movie as a whole gets a honorable mention because out of 142 minutes, 88 don’t have dialogue.

If you look at the Pixar shorts they tend to use a minimum of dialog. It gives them a chance to show off what great animators they are. With out a word they set the mood, clue you into what the characters are thinking and tell the entire story. All that is there in the moves too, because they really are great animators, it’s just that you may not always be as aware of it because of the talking.

You don’t see as much of that in television cartoons because it’s cheaper to talk then it is to animate. Samurai Jack would be one of the best exceptions.

I think being silent makes the viewer pay better attention.

[MichaelEmouse]

@zombywoof

There’s the famous Buffy episode Hush, with almost 30 minutes free of spoken dialogue.

Funny how social changes can affect plots. If a bunch of teenagers were unable to speak because of a curse today, they’d just shrug and text each other.

[AncientHumanoid]

The very end of The Great Escape

The guard’s expression/body language is great.

That Nile’s Ironing scene is still funny, even the 90th time I’ve watched it.

[Alessan]

@MichaelEmouse

Funny how social changes can affect plots. If a bunch of teenagers were unable to speak because of a curse today, they’d just shrug and text each other.

They might not even notice.

[glee]

There are at least two silent scenes in Manhunter where Will Graham (played superbly by William Peterson) investigates the evidence to find a serial killer.

Sadly I couldn’t find the precise clips on Youtube, but they are:

when Graham walks through one of the bloody crime scenes

and

when Graham finds the connection between the two sets of victims - and thus how to find the killer

[Fear_Itself]

The death of Dr. Mark Greene on ER.

[Tangent]

The scene in Jaws where Chief Brody’s son is mimicking his gestures at the dinner table. A wonderful little moment that has nothing to do with the plot, but it’s part of what makes Brody such a sympathetic character.

[Headrush042]

Will Farrell’s and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s kiss scene in Stranger Than Fiction. There’s only 2 spoken lines, a song, and a lot of chemistry.

[Shoeless]

The waltz scene in Grand Central Station from The Fisher King.

[Siam_Sam]

@zombywoof

The 1955 French heist film Rififi is another well known example.

@Siam_Sam

I came in to mention Rififi. A fantastic 28-minute safecracking scene that occupies a fourth of the movie without music or a single word.

Supposedly, the Paris police briefly banned the film for fear it would serve as an instructional guide, but that may be just an Urban Legend.

@Sasori

Not only in France, but also in Germany. They had to cut out a whopping seven minutes before it could be shown in the cinemas. Thankfully, it has been restored in all its glory.

You will find an hommage to that silent scene in Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Red Circle, where the burglary at the jeweller’s is also silent. Originally, Melville was supposed to film Rififi, but gave Jules Dassin the script out of friendship, because Dassin was in a hard place after beeing denounced by Edward Dmytryk and kicked out of the US by the HCUA.

Just a side note, as this made me think of it. This month marks 20 years since the long-standing Rififi Bar closed it’s doors for good in Bangkok’s Patpong red-light district. In it’s heyday it was one of the top bars in the area, but in latter years it had become so run down that people started calling it the Riff-Raffi.

[madsircool]

The first 10 1/2 minutes of The Good The Bad and The Ugly

[terentii]

Many (if not most) of the scenes in the original Mission: Impossible, especially the ones with Barney Collier at work.

With most TV shows, you can listen while you do the housework and not miss much. Not true with MI. It told its stories with pictures.

[kopek]

Moat of the movie “The Naked Prey”

The Naked Prey (1965) - IMDb

[Senegoid]

Silent Movie (Mel Brooks, 1976), a parody on the old silent movie genre. Entire movie contains exactly one spoken word . . .

. . . spoken by

Marcel Marceau.

[Smeghead]

That chunk of the Buffy episode “The Body”.

[kopek]

@Senegoid

Silent Movie (Mel Brooks, 1976), a parody on the old silent movie genre. Entire movie contains exactly one spoken word . . .

. . . spoken by

Marcel Marceau.

That was the first one that sprang to my mind but in the end I decided it had quite a bit of dialogue; just printed instead of spoken.

[Melbourne]

@Aquadementia

If you look at the Pixar shorts they tend to use a minimum of dialog. It gives them a chance to show off what great animators they are.

It gives them a chance to show what great story-tellers they are — and they avoid the hard-to-fake face animation you need for talking.

All the best bits of Jaws

“Mr Bean”, particularly the Mr Bean Holiday movie, particularly the last scene where he walks out to the ocean. The rest of the movie if funny, or cringe-worthy, but watching that last ending is like being in love.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

The scene in Untouchables on the stairway of the trair station.

The cropduster scene in North by Northwest

[Amateur_Barbarian]

At least some of the long tracking shots in Children of Men have little or no dialogue. There are shouts from attackers and crowds and the like, but very few contribute any “meaning” to the scene.

The Quiet Earth is almost dialogue-free until… the truck rolls into his path. (Semi-spoiler, there.) So is the ending.

[Siam_Sam]

The opening sequence of the animated film Up (2009).