As universal advice, I don't think this is true. This is essentially saying "sound in this movie is merely window dressing, it plays no essential role", and while this can be true of some good movies, it can't be true of all good movies. Surely sound plays a vital role in at least some movies, a role which is essential to understanding the movie...
But, in my opinion, movies are fundamentally visual and everything else is a layer on top. Maybe not "window dressing," but not too far from that. There are certainly movies where the music/sound/dialogue left a lasting impression on me, but I think movies live and die by their visuals. To put it another way, you can have a visually compelling movie that is competely silent but I don't think the reverse is true.
I'd go so far as to say, any time a movie resorts to backstory-monologues or text, the director has failed.
Obviously both radio plays (no visual-- too bad we don't have more of these lately, and we're stuck with audiobooks as a mediocre facsimile) and silent films (no sound) can work extraordinarily well.
Good film uses both to its maximal advantage.
> I'd go so far as to say, any time a movie resorts to backstory-monologues or text, the director has failed.
I disagree. You can find lots of bad examples of this, but you can also find masterful tricks of unreliable narration (Memento); you can find simple context-setting for a foreign environment (Star Wars); you have stories that leap through time that would be impractical to show all of the events and require some text or narration so the viewer knows what's up.
Basically all of the rules of thumb really mean "this is often misused" and are not prescriptive.
The viewer could figure out backstory with a few well-placed references in dialog, or from clues as the story advances. In fact, Star Wars gave us those clues anyway, so the title scrolling into the distance wasn't even useful that way.
When a director uses bad movie tropes for their own sake, that's one thing. But using them instead of directing a good narrative, that's lazy and a squandered opportunity to show us a better movie.
And yes, the radio show example is good. They needed to do lots of dialog, because that was the medium; they had one hand (both hands?) tied behind their back.
But in a movie, shutting down the visuals for a static backstory dialog is almost always a mistake. Because you can be doing so much more than that!
Not bad, simply low-brow, which is not the same.
And what about Memento? It simply doesn't work without dialogue, and it's a wonderful movie.
I disagree that this is true, and more I disagree that it reflects “show don't tell”, which isn't about visual-over-audio but demonstration-over-exposition.
There are many famous and great movies for which this isn't true. 12 Angry Men, Glengarry Glen Ross, Her, to name a few off the top of my head.
With his conversations, I can read through at speed with a decent but imperfect feel of who has said what. But I find myself wanting to get it exactly right and re-read counting the odd and even lines of dialogue to make sure I know who has said exactly what.
It's rarely critical because the conversation in many cases is such a minute* part of the story (Spanish sequences in the Border Trilogy, for example). Maybe he's counting that as sufficiently well written, but maybe he's not the sort to want to read it exactly right. Like I said, could be a personality/spectrum thing.
*I'm talking about the quick incidental conversations more than the extensive speeches, such as from Judge Holden, where the speaker is almost easily discernible and the content is certainly a key part of the experience.
Why?
Yes, there should be a symphony of sound and visual working together. But the whole point of the medium of Motion Pictures is to tell stories through... motion pictures.
Who even decides what the "point" of a media is beside the people creating stuff in the media?
What I'm saying is that a medium should play to the strengths of the unique thing that it offers over other mediums.
What do video games uniquely offer? Interactivity. Therfore, the video game medium should focus on offering interactivity that would be impossible to get in any other medium.
To the Moon[1] and Dear Esther[2] won awards and high praise from critics and players alike, despite lacklustre interactivity.
It enhanced the story and immersed me.
Thanks for the great example.
Anecdotal report of what you thought doesn’t advance the conversation. I can just say it was a boring game for me (it was) and we’re back to square one.
I feel that if you call Dear Esther’s interactivity “amazing”, you either haven’t played enough games to be able to expound judgement, or have a definition of “interactivity” different from most players. Some quotes from the Wikipedia page, based on multiple published sources:
> The gameplay in Dear Esther is minimal, with the only task being (…)
> Despite questioning whether it truly constitutes a video game (…)
> (…) critics were divided by the suitability of the video game medium for conveying the story of Dear Esther.
> (…) stating that the game "would be better as a short film" (…)
> The limited interactivity between the player and the narrative (…)
The consensus is that it’s a good work of art, with a good story, visuals, and sound design, but that there isn’t much to interact with.
I don't know what this means. If it is an insult, I am too stupid to understand it.
>I feel that if you call Dear Esther’s interactivity “amazing”, you either haven’t played enough games to be able to expound judgement, or have a definition of “interactivity” different from most players.
You could not experience the game without interacting with it. It's in first person. You move the story along as you discover new story elements. You experience emotions and perspectives first-hand.
>The consensus is that it’s a good work of art, with a good story, visuals, and sound design, but that there isn’t much to interact with.
Dear Esther would not work in any other medium. It would be extremely boring without the interactivity.
So if we're circling back to the original comment that spawned this discussion: Interactivity is what makes the medium of video games unique. Dear Esther focuses on interactivity by making the entire story unravel as you choose to explore it yourself... interactively.
Your point would stand if Dear Esther put you on rails and you barely pushed any buttons (like a Hideo Kojima cutscene). But that's not how the game is designed.
There's no single point to the medium. It's a powerful medium exactly because it's so flexible.
However, I think movies are indeed the best piece where "show, don't tell" works. There are some easy examples, like instead of writing the place and time on screen, introduce a short scene with some memorable monument, a newspaper, a dialogue causally mentioning the place. Make the scene time obvious.
Rather than reflecting some internal dialogue explaining the protagonist's mood, use music and facial expressions.
I think most great movies are (perhaps surprisingly) very watchable without sound. That might have been a better way to phrase my original comment.
Watch City Lights, by Chaplin, for example. One of the last great silent movies. You can argue it could have been funnier with more dialogue (it has some in the form of intertitles). Maybe it would. But it wouldn't have been made that way with more dialogue. Many of the scenes are structured the way they are because dialogue isn't there as an easy out of situations, and forced Chaplin to think long and hard about how to show instead of having characters tell. I'm sure the same story can be done well with talking characters, but it's not a given at all it'd have been better, because the script would almost certainly have been very different.
The most famous example from City Lights is probably the scene where Chaplin gets mistaken for a rich man by a blind girl selling flowers, which is a major setup for the rest of the movie.
Chaplin struggled with it for ages, because he felt he needed to actually give a reason to explain why she'd think he was rich.
The solution is beautifully simple: Chaplin steps through a car to avoid a police officer, and slams the door, both signalling his presence to the girl and signalling initial wealth (the movie was filmed in 1928/9). We (and he) learns that she is blind by seeing her not realize he's picked up the flower (there's one line of text there), he pays her, and as he has just handed her effectively the last money he has, the owner of the car enters and the car drives off, leaving the girl to think Chaplin did not wait for his change, giving her further reason to assume his wealth (there's another intertitle with one line there).
It took weeks of filming over several periods to get it right; both because Chaplin struggled with finding the right mechanism, as well as because he insisted on showing her blindness realistically (and so he rejected a whole slew of actresses he didn't believe could realistically portray being blind). With dialogue it'd be so easy to cop out and use some dialogue to cause the confusion.
As it stands City Light is frequently considered one of the best movies of all time.
The scene in question is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCPGFTp0vmo
Imagine a movie that can be watched with no sound but still tells the whole story. Now imagine the same movie can be listened to without seeing the screen, and again, tells the whole story.
The point of "show, don't tell," is to keep lazy or beginning writers from relying too heavily on assumptions about their readers. It doesn't mean "make things explode and don't worry about the plot making sense."
Many of the most emotional and powerful parts of great movies are shown, not told. Also, I'd argue that it's usually worse and more shallow movies where every little bit is explained and spelled out for the viewer (often in dialogue or narrative exposition), and very little is left if anything is left for them to figure out, make sense of, or decide on their own.
Of course there aren't actual rules and the best writers break the not-actual-rules all the time. But a lot of really bad writing does seem to involve telling rather than showing. And isn't the goal of writing classes the elimination of really bad writing?
I'm very skeptical of the idea that someone can be taught to be a (good) novelist. I don't think that someone can lend you their model; I think you have to develop your own. Cormac McCarthy explained his use of punctuation with "There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate." I find that quote hysterically funny. I don't have a strong opinion about whether he's right. Rather, I think the whole point is that he has a strong sense of what good writing is and it's his.