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Movie Takes
The Artist
Simply delightful, using the conventions of the silent movie to restore narrative to its rightful, moving place.
The Artist, by the French director Michel Hazanavicius, begins with the noise of an old-fashioned projector and a black screen. Music then comes up, a jazzy tune reminiscent of the 1920s without being quite of the period. The titles which then appear are entirely of the period, known to us now as “the silent era” — as is what we are soon seeing on the screen, which is a lurid adventure yarn in living black-and-white. Called “A Russian Affair,” the movie has reached a peak of excitement as the hero, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is being tortured with an electrical current through his head, administered by a couple of sinister-looking Russians. “I won’t talk!” he cries to his torturers by means of a dialogue title printed on the screen. “I won’t say a word” — a promise that the film allows him to keep in spite of the word he has just supposedly spoken. “Speak!” the Russians command him, also by inter-title. But he remains silent — then and throughout both that film and the one we are watching.
It is a good joke and one that Mr. Hazanavicius returns to several times, as when he shows Valentin gathered with his fellow stars on the other side of the screen, awaiting their cue to appear for a curtain call at the film’s premiere under a sign reading “Please be silent behind the screen.” Later, his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) ominously says — again in print, of course — to Valentin: “We have to talk, George.” Alas, George has already told Al Zimmer (John Goodman), the studio boss of Kinograph pictures what he told the sinister Russians, namely that he’s not talking. Shown his first talkie, George tells Al via another dialogue title, “If that’s the future, you can have it.” Well, Al does and he doesn’t. Sticking with silence, he takes a bath with a self-produced film in which we see his character sinking into quicksand at the end. Virtually overnight, he’s all washed up.
While he is on his way down in the quicksand of post-crash 1929, sinking into despair and alcoholism and, therefore, cliché, a young ingenue called Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), with whom he has had a brief but unforgettable flirtation in his glory days, is on her way up. She becomes, in one of the film’s few false notes, a “superstar.” For although the OED gives a date of 1925 for the first appearance of this word, I think for most people at the time just being a star was quite enough hype to be going on with — and quite enough, too, to make the familiar, melodramatic point that youth must be served and the old must give way to the young — as the wounded and failing George overhears Peppy saying to an interviewer. But this isn’t, quite, A Star is Born, for we also know from the larger-than-life faces of these two extraordinarily attractive people — which are all that we have to go on, after all — that their love is a different and brighter cliché. That love conquers everything will go without saying.
George’s trademark on screen and off is his little Jack Russell terrier. “If only he could talk,” he says of this beast, though his own words are equally unheard. The inarticulate but obviously highly trained animal is also a reminder of the origin of the movies in vaudeville — where animal acts had absence of speech in common with early movies. Both were necessarily founded on familiar conventions, also known as clichés, but at their best — as they are in The Artist — these are clichés that preserve, somehow, an unexpected freshness. In The Artist this is owing, I think, to the unfamiliarity of modern audiences with the conventions of silent film. So much can be conveyed in the absence of speech partly because the absence of speech is, to us, so shocking and unusual. I think that our visual sense must be more acute in compensation as well, for we are continually struck by the long-forgotten silent-movie experience, especially the larger than life beauty of the two principals and, therefore, of their not quite tragic love for each other.
To me, at any rate, it was like watching the familiar story for the first time. The unfamiliar context created sorrow at the lovers’ partings and joy at their reunions that would hardly have been possible in a more straightforward — and spoken — telling. The movie is a love story, but the yearning it expresses is not just of two people for each other but of a whole world for articulacy and understanding. At one point George has a dream where everything around him makes its appropriate noise — all noises we can hear on the sound-track — and only he is mute. Maybe, too, I was moved partly by the evidence that Hollywood story-telling is not quite dead after all, as I have so often suspected it is in recent years. Although the movie was made principally by French people, there was enough of a Hollywood presence in it, even beyond the setting in the Southern California of the heroic period, to make it a hopeful sign and an example to its models and idols to return to their roots.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
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Richard Baker| 1.24.12 @ 7:12AM
As someone who owns a collection of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films, I am pleasantly surprised that anyone is doing any version of a silent picture. One thing I heard once about silents is that you can't look away otherwise you'll miss the meaning of the story. Does this portend a renaissance of the silent movies? Hope so.
Alan Brooks| 1.24.12 @ 7:02PM
At first glance, I thought the photo was of Errol Flynn.
Jocon307| 1.24.12 @ 10:32PM
You should try Mel Brooks "Silent Movie" it is quite good and totally silent except for one amusing word (you'll have to watch it see and hear the joke).
It is quite watchable and very cute and amusing. It is also a great love offering to his wife Ann Bancroft, at least in part, I thought.
And when we saw it on TV I realized too what you are saying. I couldn't just get up and go to the kitchen and keep following the story as I could have with a sound film.
I don't remember too much of the story, except it is about some guys who want to make a film. I'm not even sure if it takes place in the modern era or back in the day.
But I think anyone who likes silent films will get a kick out of it.
CRW| 1.24.12 @ 7:43AM
In the marvelous 1980 documentary about the silent film era “Hollywood,” Lillian Gish states that the “language” of silent films is international.
Even without intertitles, anyone can understand the story. That disappeared with the coming of sound.
I recommend “Hollywood” to all film lovers, silent and/or sound. Unfortunately, “Hollywood” is only available on VHS (if you can find it).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_(documentary)
POST American| 1.24.12 @ 8:04AM
---NON-essentiual artsy drivel.
MEANWHILE, no time, talent or money
on hand to remember, much less deliver
revelatory examination of, the again
'overlooked' 60th Anniversary of the
staggeringly relevant
---------------------KOREAN WAR------------------.
Mind control ---Globalist betrayal ---TREASON
and aggressive EUGENICS just don't seem
to get ANY traction with franchise slum
Hollywood these days.
$$$$$trange isn't it.
OH, and then there's that other trifling and
wholly unreckoned with milestone,
the 200th Anniversary of when another
Globalist police state power grab was
thwarted--
Napoleon's 1812 DEFEAT in Russia.
--SO!
--------SEE YOU AT THE MOVIES!
---------------THAT WERE NEVER MADE!
American| 1.24.12 @ 11:22AM
My dear, you forgot to take your morning Chlorpromazine, it is in the top drawer, as usual. Sorry, we ran out of Haloperidol.
Cpm| 1.24.12 @ 4:08PM
$$$$$trange doesn't even begin to describe you, POST.
Alan Brooks| 1.24.12 @ 7:04PM
perhaps Post wants to ban art altogether??
albert constantine jr| 1.24.12 @ 8:43PM
Regarding the late Korean conflict (currently only in ceasefire), I recommend the film "Prisoner of War" with Ronald Reagan. Each time I hear of the Keystone debacle, I hear the immortal line: "Pipeline".
Louis Hatchett| 1.24.12 @ 11:07AM
I have always contended that silent films could co-exist with sound films. Silent movies are just another form of artistic expression. There is no reason why film producers believe there is no audience for them. A large, if not massive, audience can be cultivated for them.
American| 1.24.12 @ 11:23AM
Guys, did any of you actually watched the movie, to the end? Only the first half of the movie is silent, for COL!
PolishKnight| 1.24.12 @ 12:13PM
Subtitled films are similar to silent films in that you need to read to understand the dialogue and move your eyes around a lot (read the subtitles then get back to the action.) So in the old days, silent films were sparse on dialogue to allow the viewer to keep up.
What many people hate about subtitled films is what I love about them: You have to pay attention and keep up. You have to think. You have to be literate even for a film that really isn't all that intellectual.
JimH| 1.24.12 @ 1:05PM
True. If I didn't have the subtitles I'd have no idea what was going on in those old Shaw brothers Kung Fu epics.
Georgia Xanthopoulou | 1.24.12 @ 2:22PM
www.unsungfilms.com, by Georgia Xanthopoulou
This was the year of my return to the festival which turned me into a film junkie a long long time ago. You can say I fell off the wagon again this year… I was first introduced to the festival in 2002 and have been hooked since. ‘Opening Nights’ screens a plethora and varying types of films, from the biggest premieres of the year, to retrospectives of great directors and film movements, to films one will probably never get the chance to see again on the big screen. All in all, a film buff’s oasis in the midst of the blues every September gives you. So, you must imagine my disappointment when, for the last four years, the ‘antidote’ to September’s blues was not running from film theater to film theater but studying abroad. Being a graduate and feeling quite as lost as Ben Braddock, this year I, at least, went back to watching 25 films in two weeks and loving the process as always.
I have to say the highlights of the festival are completely subjective, since I am always careful to choose the films I am most likely to enjoy. This festival, to me, is never about being educated, even though I often am in the process of it. However, every time I choose what is safest to watch-at least according to my personal taste. And it’s gotten me so far.
‘The Artist’ would have to be the film of this festival to me (yes, the revelation at the Cannes’ festival as well, but who ever gets to watch that one?). A black and white silent movie isn’t exactly what companies produce in 2011. As retro, exotic, risqué or boring an idea it may sound to some, the film was extremely refreshing, as it was up to the actors’ facial expressions and the music to do all the work. Usually, I tend to enjoy the more ‘cerebral’ type of comedy, one based on witty dialogue and word plays. This was definitely absent here, as good timing in delivering lines is replaced by the more emotive dimension of acting and music. And the impact is great. The film starts off as a silent revisiting of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ (did anybody else thought the leading man — Palme D’Or winner btw, looked a lot like Gene Kelly?) as it tells the story of a silent film star finding it hard to transition successfully to a career in the talkies. And, of course, there is the girl who is talented, spunky and cute whom the protagonist helps with her career. However, the film soon adopts a more dramatic tone, as one sees the heart ache involved in realizing you are not compatible with current situations, getting to reminiscing more and more the old times when things were easier and he was famous and, slowly, loses his mind.
It is obvious that the film serves the same purpose of reminding us a time when things were simpler as well. It is definitely a nostalgic approach to cinema but, somehow, it works, especially at a time when Europe seem to re-evaluate, or wishes it has valued more, the past years. And, by the end, when you realize that if this was a talkie, it would have never worked, or been made in the first place, since the actors wouldn’t have been believable as Hollywood film stars with their French accents. So, it might not be nostalgia for a simpler time, just a call for filmmaking whose creativity is not bound by language barriers-and all the other restrictions that come with it.
Georgia Xanthopoulou at www.unsungfilms.com
POST American| 1.24.12 @ 10:21PM
-----AGAIN-----
Hollywood continues to obediently BURY
all treatment, indeed all mention of the
yet unfolding, 'EUGENICS friendly'
--------------RED Chinese Halocaust'-------------
OR
-the 20th --30th --40th --50th -and NOW
60th Anniversary of the
---------------------KOREAN WAR----------------------
OR EVEN
-the astoundingly significant 200th Anniversary
of the defeat of another Globalist police state
power grab
-------NAPOLEON'S 1812 DEFEAT in RUSSIA-----
SO, stop woshipping the rectum of
'things as they are presented' -
and --START tuning in to things
as they ----ARE.
Your very own Book of Revelation
awaits. . .
-AMEN-
kraldiziler | 2.2.12 @ 6:41PM
What many people hate about subtitled films is what I love about them: You have to pay attention and keep up. You have to think. You have to be literate even for a film that really isn't all that intellectual.