Silent Films

I've been thinking about silent films lately. They are an interesting format to me, and I wonder if they can still be relevant.

I don't think I would want to do it in the older style of characters talking and then showing the text on screen. What I'm interested in is the power of a story where characters are not speaking.

I heard a discussion of the movie Rocky V, where it was said that the street fight at the end of the movie was more story being told than the entire rest of the movie. The action and the music told everything.

I'm not sure if scenes like this could tell a story on their own, or if they can only be used as a poignant scene which requires dialogue to set up.