SMC Pod #174: Dialogue-less Movies (Pure Cinema)

Today, we look at some of the great "pure cinema" movies with little to no dialogue. Now listen-dialogue is great. Dialogue is cinematic. But to scale the heights, a moviemaker needs to know how to communicate cinematically (image + sound) without using dialogue as a crutch to convey information. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at F.W. Murnau's 1924 masterpiece The Last Laugh (with only two intertitles for the entire movie), avant garde master Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, Ron Fricke's 70mm essay movie Baraka, the incredible Ukranian movie all in sign language The Tribe, and Phil Tippet's stop motion mind blower Mad God as examples of movies whose power comes from their commitment to what Alfred Hitchcock called "pure cinema".