Dec. 21, 2011 - Issue #844: The Artist

The Artist

There is an idea in our society that progress only moves in one direction: ever-forward into the new. It's an idea intrinsic to the intersection of art and technology: motion pictures moved from magic lanterns to zoetropes, from silent pictures to talkies, from black and white to Technicolor, from celluloid to digital and now into experiments with 3D. Throughout each step, not many tears have been shed for the format left behind—no one is left wishing they could see The Dark Knight on zoetrope.

But as each progression gains something, it loses something else. Critics of 3D have railed against its low light and lack of clarity, and have complained that it privileges novelty over story. Because red, orange and yellow could be displayed so beautifully in early Technicolor, almost every movie from the era has a scene with a fire. Technology threatens to overshadow the story—the medium becomes the message.

As a silent, black-and-white movie, The Artist may seem anachronistic, a novelty. Instead, what writer and director Michel Hazanavicius saw in the format was a way to get to the heart of a story.
"People think it's very intellectual to watch a silent movie but to me it's the exact opposite—it's very sensual and very sensorial experience," the Parisian director explains. "It's the purest way to tell a story for a director because it's about cinema, you really use cinema. You don't use dialogue so you tell the story only with images."

The images in the movie are myriad and intense. The story of silent-film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and his romance with up-and-coming talkie star Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), set amidst the backdrop of the decline of silent film in 1920s Hollywood, The Artist relies on scale, position and expression to tell its tale. One hardly ever sees the downwardly-mobile George walking up stairs—no matter where he is, he is moving downward.

"All the movie is built with that kind of constriction," Hazanavicius says. "You have a game with the shadows, with the contrast, with the mirrors, with the clothes—everything has to tell the story."
The beauty of silent film, Hazanavicius says, is its immersive, participatory way of telling a story. That quality, of being drawn deeper into the story by your own imagination, is what sets it apart from contemporary, full-colour talkie films. It's an instance where restricting the medium makes the message all the more powerful.

"As an audience member you participate with the storytelling process," Hazanavicius says. "The sound, the voices, the dialogue and even the colour, you put in with your own imagination. That makes you very close to the story, so you stick to the characters, you stick to the story and in the end you made your own movie."


The story in The Artist is familiar in Hollywood: with the transition to talkies, plenty of silent-film stars fell off the face of the earth, ditched by studio bosses—like the one played here by John Goodman—who once made their living off them. The depiction of the era and its esthetics is bang on and emerges from the details—the "Hollywood" sign declares its original message of "Hollywood Land," Peppy Miller's name is misspelled on the title cards of her early pictures—but despite so many "old" elements in the film, Hazanavicius was able to imbue the picture with a modern sensibility.

"People think of black-and-white silent movies as old and they're right, but they're old not because they are black-and-white and silent, but because they were made in the '20s," he says. "The trick to doing a modern movie is to do it now. I didn't want to do a fake '20s movie—I made a period movie which respects the way that they were shooting movies back in the day. I tried to find a balance."
Making the movie was a personal quest for Hazanavicius. He didn't take an easy road: not only did he want to make a silent, black-and-white picture, he also wanted to cast two relative unknowns in the lead roles. The writing was intense: stripped of his usual tools, Hazanavicius learned a whole new way to tell a story. He had to constantly justify his decision to tell a story silently.

Why did he keep going? It came down to the same reason he was able to convince one of the few well-known actors in the whole picture to sign up.

"When John Goodman decided to come onto a silent, black-and-white, French movie made by an unknown director with unknown lead actors, he did it for one reason: he said, 'I've never seen that movie and I want to be a part of it,'" Hazanavicius recounts. "That was a good reason." vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus