Cinematography technique · used in 10 films
Borrowing the physical comedy of silent films, such as pratfalls, precisely timed gags and expressive body language. It is a nod to where cinema came from.
Examples
Charlie Chaplin · 1936
Chaplin kept making a mostly silent film years after sound arrived. He tried sound scenes and went back to silence with sound effects and a few lines, because he thought the Tramp would lose his charm by speaking. The jokes are pratfalls and timing, and they still work with no translation.
Where to see it: The assembly line. The Tramp tightens bolts on a moving belt, falls behind and ends up caught inside the machinery.
Charlie Chaplin · 1940
The Barber's scenes play like Chaplin's old silent Tramp films. You get carefully timed gags with shaving tools, a face that says everything without words and a body that carries all the comedy. This is a sound film about a world being destroyed by speeches. The man who beats the dictator does it with physical comedy, and that is the film's political point.
Where to see it: The Barber's barbershop sequences. You get silent-era physical comedy inside a sound film, and the Tramp's body language is used on a new crisis in history.
Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly · 1952
Kelly and O'Connor's physical comedy comes straight from Keaton and Chaplin. You see the exact control of the body in space, props used as extensions of character and gags built on perfect timing with no need for dialogue. The tribute is built into the film itself. The film is about silent cinema, and it grieves for that style by performing it.
Where to see it: 'Make 'Em Laugh'. In O'Connor's sequence with the dummy and the wall, the physical comedy is as exact as anything in the silent film tradition.
Roman Polanski · 1967
Much of the humor is physical. The professor gets stuck in a roof window, and the hunters blast a locked door with a cannon powered by steam pressure instead of gunpowder. It plays like silent comedy.
Where to see it: The roof window: Abronsius gets stuck in the aperture above the crypt, leaving Alfred to try to stake the Count alone.
Woody Allen · 1969
The soap gun is a perfectly timed visual gag. A prop fails because of the weather, and you need no dialogue to get the joke. Allen builds his jokes the way silent comedians did, out of a simple object and a bad turn of luck.
Where to see it: The soap gun: Virgil carves a gun from soap for an escape attempt, and it dissolves in the rain.
Woody Allen · 1973
Allen builds a late gag from a simple object and a physical accident, like a silent comedian would. The Leader survives only as a nose, and Miles has to deal with it.
Where to see it: The Leader's nose: Miles steals the surviving nose of the Leader and drops it in front of a road roller.
Woody Allen · 1975
Allen pays tribute to the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin. The cannon scene is built like a silent gag: a small man, a big machine and a very bad idea.
Where to see it: The cannon: Boris falls asleep inside a cannon that fires into the French command tent, and he becomes an accidental war hero.
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen · 1987
People get chased, punched and blown up, and they keep going. Viewers have compared the film to a live-action Looney Tunes short. The camera and the pacing treat danger as a gag, so you laugh even when a grenade goes off.
Where to see it: The fight with Leonard Smalls. Smalls beats Hi badly, then Hi pulls the pin on one of the grenades on the bounty hunter's vest, and they all explode.
Peter Jackson · 2005
Ann is a vaudeville performer, and her stage act is how she wins Kong over. The film plays her routine like an old stage act. It nods to the early days of cinema while still working as a scene about trust.
Where to see it: Vaudeville routine: Ann performs her vaudeville act in front of Kong to keep his attention on her.
Andrew Stanton · 2008
WALL-E is openly Chaplin's Little Tramp in robot form. He is small, earnest and in love with someone out of his league. He takes the world's indifference with dignity and humor. Stanton studied silent comedy closely. The robot expresses everything through eye movement and body language, which is a tribute to that tradition.
Where to see it: WALL-E's collection of human objects and his nightly ritual. It has the Chaplin kind of sadness, where someone treasures what the world throws away.
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