Silent Film Intertitle vs Wayang Kulit
サイレント映画の字幕カード / ワヤン・クリ（影絵芝居）
Silent Film Intertitle comes from Film Technology and Wayang Kulit from Stage Design. One is technique and the other style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Silent Film Intertitle
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Dialogue and description were cut into the film as separate cards of type. This is where cinema and typography first met.
Wayang Kulit
Javanese shadow theater works pierced leather puppets between a lamp and a screen, and in doing so perfected a formal language of contour, silhouette and the stylized profile.
| Silent Film Intertitle | Wayang Kulit | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1900s–1920s | traditional–present |
| Family | Film Technology | Stage Design |
| Kind | Technique | Style |
| Cues | Text cards on black / Ornamental frames / Hand lettering / Alternating rhythm with the action | Pierced leather puppets / Stylized profiles / Shadow and light source / All-night performances |
| Best used for | Short films watched without sound that need dialogue on separate cards · Chapter breaks and advertising borrowing the manner of the silent era | Stage or screen work that must narrate with a lamp and a sheet · Character design reducing figures to profiles that repeat as signs |
| Type | Different faces for speech and narration, trimmed to fit one card | Treat letters as pierced holes, read from the leather left behind |
| Composition | Center the text and keep even space on all four sides | Profiles ranged left and right, the center kept open for confrontation |
| Material | White out of black, with a faint film weave and gate flicker | Pierce the hide to pass light, vary shadow density by rod angle |
| Caution | Cards that explain too much stop the flow every time they appear, and the film turns into something to be read rather than watched. | Building the shadow as a plain black shape loses the information carried in the piercing, and nothing separates it from a cut-out silhouette. |