Pauses
Name : dazedandconfused
Email : anbharadwaj [at] yahoo[dot] com
City/Country: Hyderabad, India
Pauses…when you don’t need dialogues…
We have always heard that ‘Silence is Golden’ and ‘Looks can kill’ etc. I remember reading an essay written by the great Satyajit Ray in which he said that dialogues should be the last resort of the director to communicate to his audience. First attempt should be through the story and the acting. Second option could be using music and other effects and only when all this fail, should a director resort to dialogues.
That comment has always stayed with me and I think that’s so true. Sadly not many directors are brave enough to let silence reign on the screen for a few moments and let the audience decipher the unsaid. How many actors are out there who can look at the camera and convey that emotion without saying anything at all, without using glycerine?
I just watched ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ and if you have watched the series like I have you will agree that it’s the ultimate adrenaline rush movie running at breakneck speed. But what separates this movie with other run-of-the-mill action movies is that the director, Paul Greengrass is not afraid to throw in some scenes with long pauses and believe me you won’t even realize the pauses were long since the whole moment is fraught with so much tension!
My favorite scene in the movie- Jason Bourne and Nicky Parsons sit in a roadside café and then in the middle of a conversation,
Jason Bourne: Why are you helping me?
A 12 second pause as Nicky considers her reply and places her coffee cup gingerly back on the table. Frequently in scripts you read about beats. What’s a normal beat length? Five seconds?
Nicky Parsons: It was difficult for me….with you
Now a huge 18 second pause! Close alternate shots of Jason and Nicky (twice each) as each mull over what she has just said. The only noise is that of the traffic some distance away and the buzz of the café. The tension is unbelievable.
Nicky (quickly): You really don’t remember anything, do you?
Five second pause as Jason stares back at her.
Jason: No
Another ten second pause. Two men enter the café. The moment is broken.
Jason: We have to move.
Now that’s a bloody one minute movie if there ever was one, three fourths of which was just silence with two people staring right at each other about their unspoken and forgotten past. No music, no action, no nothing. And with just five lines of dialogue.
Paul Greengrass, take a bow.
Any other beautiful silences you guys can think of in recent movies?
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big B is the master of using pauses and long silences for dramatic effect. one scene that jumps into my head instantly is the scene with rashid [zakir hussain] in sarkar where they’re drinking tea
amitabh and dilipkumar scene in shakti, after vijay arrives from jail after his mother’s (rakhi)death….
well Dilip Kumar was the king of pauses using it to amazing effect in my view. Raj’s comment reminds me of another scene in Shakti - where Amitabh returns to the house with bag, sees Dilip Kumar in the living room… pause… the ego both carry in them is melting away… Watch how effectively both actors use their eyes to convey this… father and son about to break free from years of strained relations when… you know what happens…
Another one from Ijaazat… Naseer and Rekha in the waiting room of the station, Naseer has just told Rekha his story. He wants to know what Rekha has been doing… there is a yearning to get Rekha back in his life… and he goes something like this
“aur tum…” (and you…)
pause about a few seconds
“akeli ho?…” (are you single?….)
bang… door opens… Shashi Kapoor walks in…
That pause between the first and second line carried so much yearning that it carried over to the viewer who optimistically is hoping as hell that Rekha is still single… Brilliant one that!
Striker, Raj- Yes agree with both of you. Big B can hold the camera and burn the screen down with his intensity.
Another scene which comes to my mind is from Rang De. Aamir returns to his firang girlfriend’s house after their demonstration gets lathi charged. He is beaten and bruised and not just physically. He sits down at the table in her kitchen. She moves around the place, sets a plate and a couple of rotis in front of him. His heart is heavy. He tries to eat but the food doesn’t go down his throat and he breaks down.
Beautiful scene.
dazed.. i just watched rang de again last week.. and that scene is freshly etched in my memory.. that must’ve been a good 30-second pause for aamir.. the camera stays on him to show his breakdown before he finally does.. and how he performs this scene so effortlessly and beautifully is simply beyond me..
another awesome scene that just came to mind is in khosla ka ghosla.. the first meeting between boman and navin.. the tension is so thick you could cut it with a knife.. the clash of the personalities and egos is so well portrayed.. and both boman and navin’s body language speaks volumes for itself!
Haasil…Haasil had so many pauses…between Jimmy Shergill and Tinnu Anand…
One scene where Tinnu Anand gifts his son a watch and pauses…and asks him..” Acchi lagi?” Jimmy happily nods…pause and then Tinnu says..mujhe shayad abhi tumhari taste pata chalne lagi hain…
many of Irrfan khan..this guy is a king of pauses again…who can forget theat drunken scene…Gaurishankar…..pause…pause..Pandey
Another one is when Jimmy tells him he cannot meet Hrishita because they dont have a place to meet…so irffan arranges a place and says
” Ab tum dono wahan milna aur khoob…pause..pause..khat likhna”
The pauses in Ocean’s Eleven between George Clooney and Brad Pitt because they’re able to understand each other(a funny touch i liked in the movie is the both of them complete each other’s sentences)
Wow. Great writeup.
Watch krzysztof kieslowski’s movies. “The three colors” trilogy or “the decalogue”.., he shoots scenes with minutes of silence not seconds without any music and dialog. I think that needs a really strong narration. You can find not one or two but many such moments. You have to really watch them to appreciate.
Kieslowski’s Blue went over my head, but I liked his Red and White. Yes he uses pauses to great effect, but the more I watch European cinema, I find movies are full of pauses…
hell the seventies “Art” wave in Hindi cinema is full of pauses galore.
I’ll get shot for this, but I loved the silences in ‘Black’ too..
Please don’t shoot me for saying that guys!!!!
Also, there are some wonderful scenes in ‘Parineeta’, especially when Sanjay Dutt offers Vidya’s farther money to help them.
We see Vidya trying to fight back her tears, whilst her expressions say more than a million words!
Also, there were some beautiful moments of silence in ‘Nishabd’ too.
And, how can I forget, ‘Bhoot’!!
Seriously guys, the silences are absolutely amazing in this movie!!!
And there were quite alot of them in this film.
I really feel that alot of people ignore this movie due to its weak story, but in terms of tension building, it was bloody fantastic!!!
Ah, also M. Night Shyamalan’s movies have alot of scenes in which silence communicates.
Be it ‘6th Sense’, ‘Unbreakable’, ‘Signs’ or ‘The Village’.
I still remember the scene in ‘Unbreakable’ in which Bruce Willis is walking around that house with that long coat.
It was very eerie.
Great one Andy!!!
Subtelety is sometime so important. There are scenes that you remember for their dialogue-less beauty and there are scenes that you remember that were ruined by dialogues!
I remember at least one such scene that was ruined in an otherwise fantastic movie.
Chak De India: One of the last scenes. India has won the world cup and SRK is back in his house when a kid comes and erases traitor written on his wall. The scene would have been beautiful had the kid left running with a hockey stick. But when he shouted Chak de… he just ruined the scene.
Good to read a fresh opinion (and not the cliche monotonous reviews that this site has been flooded with lately).
lost in translation is an example and also babel……….
Ankush (one of Nana Patekar;s most powerful performances) had him in a very underplayed role contrary to his recent image. The scene just before the prayer song at Nisha Singh’s house is so real.
And also the climax where the wronged quartet goes on a killing spree, they don’t speak a single word, yet communicate so much with their eyes.
But the baap of handling silence is the great Kurosawa. Toshiro Mifune was such a genius actor. If I list the gems the two have created with silence, it would be injustice to all the scenes that would eventually be left out.
Mohanlal ‘pauses’ were superb in Company.
His eye movement coupled with those fantastic
pauses were a treat to watch.
Scene in which chandu n malik come to police station.
The way mohanlal delivers dialogue while playing with a paperweight —amazing.
‘hum to aapke liye hi kam karte hain’
n the the 3rd degree scene where he asks
‘tumhe ye kisne batya ki police kanun pe chalti hain?’
wow, thanks for your comments people- I need to catch up on a lot of movies!
oz- haven’t watched Ijazat but that’s a lovely scene…
Fa yeung nin wa (In The Mood For Love) directed by Kar Wai Wong is one of the best movies where pauses are plenty and beautifully done scenes between the protagonists. Thats one brilliant example I can give.
It has a story and brilliant background score. If the Bollywood directors want to make love stories then some pointers can be taken:P
Unlike our outrageous testosterone and estrogen driven love stories.:D
Pauses were brilliantly used between Nana Patekar and Yashpal sharma and nana and jiva(commissionar suchak) in ab tak chhappan.
striker- thanks. It really feels good when someone understands what you are talking about. Lucky for me that you watched Rang De last week and loved that scene…
Khosla ka Ghosla is one of my recent favorites but more than the silence I remember Nishchol saying ‘Aap Broker hain ya party?’ Lol.
Another one from ‘Lakshya’, Farhan Akhtar’s underrated movie. Hritik is leaving for his final mission and sees Preity. His commander gives him permission and he goes to meet her. There are so many things that each want to say to each other and may never get the opportunity but it was not the time nor the place as the army convoys head in all directions around them and there is a business like finality in the air. You could almost sense that they wanted to just hug each other. But instead nothing is said.
Lovely.
OM- Irrfan is good with his pauses even in the Hutch ads!
Murali- I have watched krzysztof kieslowski
Steve- Should the pauses in horror movies like ‘Bhoot’ count?
I mean the pauses/silences themselves don’t say much but keep us on the edge of our seats because we are waiting for what is going to happen next. Nothing much actually happens during the pauses except for people moving from their bedroom to their bathroom etc.
A subtle difference. I guess there are many kinds of pauses and uses thereof. Agree?
Thanks Shreyash! Talking of ending being botched up, here’s another one-
Dil Chahta Hai- In an almost perfect movie, the penultimate scene. All three of them sit on the parapet as they watch Dimple’s stuff being taken out of her house. All three of them then slowly walk away from the place, together but each with their own memories. The movie should have finished there. Instead, we had the corny ending in Goa where Akshay meets his next romantic interest. Oh well!
in context of the topic ….the character that comes to mind is that of malik from company….
ajay devgan has very few dialogues in the movie..
he speaks through silence viz his eyes…..
absolutely brilliant….
he should have got the national award for comapnay rather than “the legend of Bhagat singh”(he was exceptional in that movie too)
That comment about Black having pauses reminds me: there were these amazing pauses between dialogue in another amazing movie - - Pushpakam :d:d:d
(just kidding)
Pushpak is an eternal classic. Thanks for reminding. That would be the longest pause in Indian cinema :d:d:d
It’s a great skill to narrate with no pause at all.
Ray was the master of pauses..no one comes even remotely close to him…Vishal used pauses well in Maqbool..Govind Nihalani also does it well..Ardhsatya was fine in this regard…Guys, watch “Alaap” if you get that somewhere..Amitabh was awesome with his silences there..possibly his best!!
The best scene with minimal dialogue is in Satya.
I will narrate the whole scene.
The scene begins after Bhiku and gang had an abortive extortion attempt at a construction site because of an ambush by an opposition gang. They manage to flee and while doing so captures a member from the opposite gang. After reaching their kholi they begin to interrogate him.
SHOT: In a clammy half dark room the victim is hanging from roof. Bhiku is leading the questions , the victim is bleeding, it seems his skin has been sliced in places.
Mamu and Chandar is sitting on a bed. Satya, standing beside bhiku, the guy with the long hair is standing by the sole window of the room.
Suddenly the long hair calls Satya, and we see Urmila is buying some vegetables in the sunny street. Chandar asks some frivolus quesiton and was rebuked by Bhiku.
Now the Classic Scene Begins: Satya goes outside to meet Urmila, but camera does not follow him.
What the camera captures instead: In the corner the hanging half-conscious victim, bhiku and all the gang members are peeping through the window of the dingy room and outside, in the street bathing with sunlight satya and urmila exchanging pleasantries, and satya’s friends are looking at them through the narrow window from that half dark room!!
In that single shot, without any dialogue, Ramu has told a story, which could not be told in 30 minutes!! We see the two world, one world where Satya and his freinds belong, a world that is devoid of light, full of blood and people who are curious to shift to the Sunny part. The other world, the normal sane world, the world which is outside of that dungeon, where Urmila belongs.
And the scene also establishes Urmila as the sole link between Satya and the normal sane world….
I was dumbstuck after watching that scene for the first time…hats off to Ramu…
hi yogesh….me being a mohanlal fan was pleased to see him being mentioned…well scriptwriters and directors of malayalam movies really use this “meaningful pauses” inserted between sequences, dialogues to great effect…
M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s scripts are classic examples…even his novels and shortstories are very cinematic because he conveys a lot by using this technique…(incomplete sentences carrying that “silence pregnant with meaning” effect..)
thanks for all who are contributing with their comments..i am getting to know abt a lot of films…puspak cannot be considered as one long pause..the absence of dialogue is not ‘pause’….
Another from Lakshya..
Hritik to Preity “Tum kehti thi na mera koi Lakshya nahi..” . he points to the peak and ………… Brilliant.
N how about the last scene of 1947 earth where Aamir sits down and smokes his beedi. His eyes do all the talking. I thot that was brilliant performance by the ACE khan in that movie…
and what do you guys say about the uncomfortable silences between vincet vega and Mia Wallace
Interspersed with pauses and with dialogs out of sync, the meeting/love making scene in ‘Out of Sight’ is one of a kind.
talk about a movie being made in the edit room!!!
Sodenberg and editor Anne Coute mulled over how to accentuate the sexual tension between the pair (as if it needed any accentuation) and came up with this wonderful idea of syncing out the dialogue and using silence, music and ambient sound to puurfect effect
My fav ones are from Mani Rathnam films.
Film Iruvar, Scene: Mohanlal arrives for the marriage of and prakash raj is already seated. Mohanlal takes up the seat adjacent to PrakashRaj. The whole scene is filmed without any dialogues, but it depicts a hollowness and frustration beatutifully. Similar to this scene is a scene in Guru, where Abhishek gets an heart attack.
And my all time fav is from Shakti and Main Azad Hoon. The scene where Azaad stands to speak to the farmers on the podium, but finds himself out of words is simply Amazing.
And who can forget the scene from shakti, where Vijay and DCP Ashwini Kumar meet after the death of Vijay’s mother.
One of the best pauses i can remember is from the film ‘The Big Night’.
Not only the pause it was one of the best climax scenes i have ever seen.
The entire climax is just a pause for more than 2 minutes with one of the brother making an omelette for breakfast and other one waiting for him at the table and the scene ends when they both sit together to eat and the movie ends with credits…the love for each other was clearly seen through their expressions and silence..they both were feeling sorry,wanted to reunite.. iexpected a dramatic ending but this one impressed me to the core… amazing!!
A very touchy scene cuz in the movie the 2 bros had conflict over their restaurant which is an Italian rest in America… A great movie with an extraordinary climax..
@dodo..
ur spot on in ur observation
couldnt agree more…
Silence used in the last shot of Majid Majeedi’s ‘Baran’ is amazing… no dialogue and it tells everything about all the charactors and story… I’ve never seen anybody using silence so nicely… no dialgues needed…
yeah long pause is definitely one of the most effective tools but it is not very popular with too many directors/actors in india…i feel Ajay Devgan is very good at it…especially in movies like Company + Omkara …i like the way vishal bhardwaj uses it in his films…itz so effective man
i wud love to watch a movie without any dialogues, just like pushpak…someone got any good ideas for a storyline…
anoop I believe story of a lost love can work…
Pause is useless without a punch in the beginning or end. Two long pauses that have stayed with me for a long time:
1. Kamal in “Nayagan”. After the taunts by Pradeep shakti’ maaro mujhe maaro, he pauses and slowly says “Naan adichaa nee seturuve”.
2. Mel Gibson - climax - long torturous pause and then “Freedom”. wow.
Long dialogues also dont hurt - Sivaji in Veera paandiya Kattabomman - climax dialogue.
I think silence was used nicely in ‘Swades’ too…
Re: Bhoot… yup, I see what you’re saying, silences can be projected in many ways, but as far as Hindi films go, there were some fab scenes in terms of tension building and atmosphere due to silences and expressions alone.
I guess with horror films we kind of overlook certain qualities, as we focus on the following scenes.
Uff, i’m not explaining myself properly today!!
great discussion and great topic!
lots of favorites. when AB and RGV come together, they create magic. I saw Nishabd for the second time yesterday and loved it even more. ditto for sarkar, heck even an AAG had few good moments.
some actors carry it with so much comfort and ease. abhishek bachchan, ajay devgan, vivek oberoi, irfan khan, KK….I can go on talking about their scenes. i guess its just a matter of how comfortable an actor is with pauses. what does he have to offer in the absence of dialogues. do dialogues make him handicapped? or is it the other way round?
watch Guru and the confrontation scene before the interval. how the 3 characters are clashing which forms the first idealogical divide in the film. you begin to feel alienated towards your beloved protagonist. someone else is saying something against him and the effect is rivetting. and so brilliantly performed. the angles, the facial expressions. other films that come to my mind are naach, sarkar, company, dil se….
a smalll joke on a news just came in… I think “Shahid Kapoor’s silence will be interesting” Saif just said he is with Kareena… lol:d
Watched Sergio Leone’s Once upon a time in the west last night. And kept remembering this topic throughout the first 20 minutes of the movie. The only words spoken in this duration are by a bit player.
This is how the scene goes….
Three men walk in through different doors into a ticket vending enclosure of a railroad station. The ticket vendor is writing the train delays on the notice board. The lighting used is classic Leone. A few rightly paced zooms into the 3 men, the ticket vendor and a squaw and the vendor speaks…
Umm…if you want tickets, you’d have to…umm…come up…umm…from the other side…umm…I guess its okay.
Long pause while vendor punches out the tickets. A slow walk towards the man closest to him and he again speaks while handing over the tickets.
That’s 3 tickets…It’ll be 7 dollars…and…
The man takes the tickets and just throws them away…the wind blowing them all around. The ticket vendor watches with a gaping mouth and just manages to mumble….and 50 cents.
They rush the vendor into a small storage vent and close the door. The old man hears them chase the squaw away. The 3 men take up different places on the station. The first one sits in a rocking chair just outside the vending enclosure, the second one walks across the platform and perches on a railing and the third one stands right under a drip through the ceiling.
For the next 3-4 minutes, these are the only sounds you hear.
1. The squeak of the rocking chair. And a fly buzzing right on the face of the man sitting on it.
2. The man perched on the railing cracking his knuckles.
3. Water dripping into the third man’s hat.
After a really long pause, we hear the whistle of the train.
This is a wonderful example of building tension through silence.
@ Mohit- You’re dead right about ‘Swades’. How about that scene when SRK is on the train back to his village after paying a visit to recover the land rent. He is already despondent and then through the windows of the train he sees a small kid selling water in an earthern cup. For somebody who has been drinking mineral water till that time in the movie, the action of buying water from the kid and drinking it speaks volumes for the movement of his character and is a big turning point in the movie told via a simple scene with no dialogues.
Great scene.
@ The Narcissist- Great scene. But I guess as I said earlier, silence can be used to build tension- it terms of what will happen next- or to actually communicate to the audience without using dialogue.
My post here primarily relates to the second case.
@dazed: check outthe movie i mentioned in your post..watch it i u get a chance..epitome of silent pauses.
My interpretation of the scene also was on the same lines dazed.
The tension in the scene wasn’t about what’s going to happen next. It was about the terror exuded by the 3 men. They hardly speak a word and yet, the ticket vendor’s expressions tell it all. The squeak of the rocking chair, the sound of the knuckles cracking and of the water dripping into the hat are symbolic of the fear that pervades the atmosphere.
Being just the opening scene, you can’t expect a lot on the “What’ll happen now?” front. It was obvious that the 3 have hijacked the station for some nefarious purpose. But the way it was done, without any loud terrorising dialogues, without any bullets being fired, without any crash and bang…it was just so eerie.
Saurav- ur comment noted. Will definitely check out the movie when i get the opportunity.
Narc- Point respectfully noted.
pauses vs lengthy dialogues …i believe it is part of cinematic language which is for the director to learn and use effectively…too many pauses is also irritating sometimes..something which i see generally in hollywood movies …..its a case of over-doing and thus negating the effect.
there are many moview which i remember for the excellent dialogues and dialogue delivery ….can everyone forward the best dialogue ..and the best dialogue delivery…i wud also like to see how it compares with the use of pauses…
Irrfan khan is master of Pause moments.i want to give one example from movie haasil.
Ranvijay singh: Anni kal tum hamere saath gaon chalo, bahut maza aayega.
Anni: nahi bhaiya kal niharika se milne jaana hai.
Ranvijay singh: yaar ye jo tumhara laundiya bazi ka chakkar jo hai … pause pause… kuch haasil nahi hoga,faltu me samay naa gawao.
That’s a brilliant post.
One of the most intense pauses I have seen in recent times is in Chak De India. The scene between SRK and Shilpa Shukla (Bindiya Naik) in the washroom. After she makes a sexual proposition to Kabir Khan, she unzips her jacket and then stares at him for a few moments. She spoke just a few words. SRK remains silent and zips her jacket and leaves the washroom. It’s one of the most well-executed scene of CDI. No background music. Just glances and silences. A rocking scene!
Charles- Actually he doesn’t remain silent. I think he says, ‘Tumhara jawab tumne khud de diya’ or something like that. But yeah, great scene.
@ dazed not only that shot of swades even when he returns from weavers house and he sat on the boat… amazing… I think in swades SRK acted for himself… only problem with that movie was its dialogues were too impractical….
@Mohit- Yeah that too…Swades is one of my favorite SRK movies…along with Paheli. I didn’t have any problem with most of the dialogues at all. But I thought that the movie was 30 minutes too long (couple of needless songs)and the heroine sucked big time every time she spoke.
Another scene- when Gayatri is tying SRK’s dhoti. No dialogues but such an intimate scene that, with loads of chemistry between the actors…
D&C
can anyone who has seen Deewaar forget Big B’s pause when the goon confronts him for ‘hafta’ for the first time .. his eyes burnt a whole in the f4%#g screen !! or the scene whr he says ‘main aaj bhi phenke hue paise nahi uthata’ followed by a short pause .. INSANE !!
Long Live BigB .. down with the poseurs !!