Here’s an interesting post that talks about why the concept of “Show, not tell” sometimes works better with a film’s audience.

“If you show the actions of a character, the audience will make their own judgements of who that character is and what they want. These judgements of the characters combine in the audience’s minds to build up their own stories about the ingredients of your movie. One of the tricks then is to let the audience sometimes get ahead of the characters and at other times let them fall behind.”

These are concepts that can be written into a story obviously, but they also can be affected in the edit suite.

However, consider that this concept doesn’t always work in every situation: In “The Dark Knight”, for instance, there was no “show” backstory on the Joker. Typically superhero movies use flashbacks or some way of quickly bringing the audience up to speed on the motivations of the character. In “Dark Knight,” the Nolan brothers had the Joker “tell” his own backstory, the only caveat being that the stories varied wildly upon each subsequent telling, and the overall effect was in fact to “show” his insanity. It’s a refreshing approach that seems to be a hybrid of both “show” and “tell.” Think about these principles as you write and edit your next project.