Silence Is Golden/Sandbox

"Art Spiegelman: Samuel Beckett once said: "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness".

Pavel: Yes

[A Beat Panel]

Art Spiegelman: On the other hand, he SAID it."

- Maus

While some people have difficulty imagining movies without spoken dialogue, the first few decades of film did extremely well without it, to the point that many filmmakers dismissed talkies as a gimmicky passing fad or a perversion of real cinema. To be honest, they initially had a point considering that film sound recording techniques were very crude in the beginning, making for some really stiffly staged and dull films until the combined talents of artists and technicians solved the problems. Regardless, perhaps it isn't such a shock to learn that, long after the end of the silent film era, many filmmakers and writers still think that silence is, well, golden.

Moreover, sound in art is actually a relatively recent innovation; very few old paintings come with any words attached to them other than the title. Even performance art has often relied more heavily on body language and visual expression than on spoken words. If the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is to be believed, shouldn't a whole series of pictures be able to speak for themselves? Silence in art has a long and distinguished history behind it.

Nowadays, however, in the presence of so many audible (or legible) artworks, silence has become a kind of innovation itself, often used to stimulate the viewer's imagination or add a vaguely brooding "cinematic" tone to the work. In television and films, running something "silent" usually means removing most or all of the dialogue, leaving just the music and/or sound effects; a few pieces remove even these. Some comics are likewise run completely silent with no dialogue, captions, or sound effects; in extreme cases, they may not even include any written words (e.g. if someone hands a character a note to read, we're not shown what it says). Others selectively cut the dialogue and/or captions while leaving sound effects present in order to have them tell the story.

Sister Trope of Deliberately Monochrome. Frequently used in surrealist films, and is sometimes combined with filmmaking techniques from the silent era for Retraux effect. Dialogue-free episodes are a popular form of Something Completely Different. Sometimes leads to Lull Destruction in adaptations. When used for horror, it overlaps with Nothing Is Scarier.

Contrast Dead Air, for situations where silence is absolutely not to be desired.