Word: wordless
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Palma's ineptitude as a writer doesn't help much. He has no sense for dialogue, and cripples the film's pace with a number of curiously inert scenes featuring stiff, unbelievable talk. Then there is a long wordless sequence, a ludicrous, halting flirtation and pick-up in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, drawn out to run 15 minutes in which DePalma (like Kubrick) deploys a steadicam camera, swimming and veering through the chambered rooms, using a subjective panning shot to cover an arc of space that the character, in fact, could take in at a glance. (The device...
...dark house. De Palma knows all about this. His camera glides down corridors and through rooms as elegantly as a downhill racer with murder on his mind. His actors of ten move at an otherworldly pace that recalls the stylized slowness of silent movies-especially in a wordless sequence that lasts almost half an hour. He builds suspense through the use of the unsuspected detail: a hand picking up a glove, a gleaming doorknob, an empty pair of shoes...
...drained by the experience, said that he would let others direct the rest of the series. Kershner was chosen for The Empire because Lucas admired his ability to deal with human relationships. Lucas himself seems a little uncomfortable with real actors, and when he was making American Graffiti, his wordless style became a friendly gag among the actors. Richard Dreyfuss later joked that he was on the set three weeks before he knew that the director could speak English. While The Empire was being made, Lucas showed up at the London studios, where the interiors were shot, only three tunes...