★★★★I had yet another pleasant movie surprise of 2011 when I saw The Artist tonight. The publicity talks about how the film is a contemporary silent movie, but I didn’t see it that way at all. It uses intertitles and very little sound, but it most definitely isn’t a silent movie.
I’m sure most viewers feel a little awkward in the opening as we don’t hear anything. This audience feeling is perfectly justified because The Artist is actually a contemporary film with no sound but for music--it's not a silent film. Silent films don’t have long stretches of silence, the takes are fairly short, and the camera is nearly static. The Artist, though opens with a long period of silence – not even music -- the camera lingers for long and short takes and the camera pans, soars and glides. The film also progresses with fast-paced modern editing. With all these elements, we’re conditioned to expect sound, and that desire is perfectly justifiable; our early discomfort in the film is a function of the way we naturally link certain cinematic elements to sound.
So The Artist is not a silent movie and has mostly superficial reference to the genre. Instead, it’s a contemporary film that is experimenting with sound and using the historical setting of the transition between silent and sound movies as its setting and theme. The movie plays with the soundtrack throughout, going totally mute as we’re watching a delighted audience applaud at one point – an action that would have had soaring music in a real silent movie – and containing sounds like that of a glass bottle chinking as it touches a table in a dream sequence. When we don’t have music, we have a loud hissing present to remind us that there’s no other sound. We soon realize in The Artist that sound is important to contemporary film.Another strong aspect of the film for me is its art direction and cinematography. The décor moves from 20s silent to 30s talkie as we see furniture, accessories and costumes change. And every image in this 1:33 frame ratio is bathed in even, three-point lighting that highlights our principals while letting the eye take in every in the full frame. Jewelry sparkles here in soft focus. Even the make-up is effective at recreating period cinema. Peppy has huge eyes that are accented with liner, and she looks like Betty Boop when she cuts a view to the side; George has a strong nose that gets occasional backlight accent, and his hair is gelled down and swept over. And we get to see the actors in close-up black-and-white. The Artist is a beautiful film that’s a great homage to the films of the late 20s-early 30s.
The two main actors are also engaging. George owns the camera when he’s in front of it, capturing our attention with his strong eyes and physicality. Peppy, too, communicates strongly with her expressive eyes and her lithe agility. The two take us through every nuance of their thought as they move through the story and certainly seem to tap into acting style of the silent era.
The Artist is a fun, and brave, film about sound. It highlights sound throughout, as a gag at the end highlights. As the film approaches it's conclusion, we see a gun, then an inter-title with “BANG!” on it. Of course we see believe the gun has fired, but the next image is of a car crash. We grin as we realize the "bang!" is the car and not the gun, and the gag again highlights how The Artist, rather than being a silent film, is actually one that highlights how sound works. Such a joke couldn't exist in a sound film. And what are we to make of the end of The Artist when we begin to get diagetic sound and discover that George has a very heavy French accent? Again, the lack of sound has enabled the movie to communicate in a way that a talking film couldn’t; we’d have known George’s national origin right away in a sound film, and we’d have known why he didn’t welcome the arrival of talkies, but silence gives us a different film and a different character.
