Re:‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Almost Ruined Me as a Writer
by vidarh on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @12:55PM
(#21194308)
You can do very much with very little when you force yourself to be constrained. Of course that doesn't mean everything works without dialogue, but many things are different in ways that may sometimes be better.
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.
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