Wired for sound
(The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius, France, 2011, 100 mins)
The death of silent cinema was a mercenary act; a slaying perpetrated by Hollywood in the name of innovation and the public’s ravenous appetite for novelty. An art form that had been refined over three decades suddenly became redundant.
From our privileged position as 21st century observers it’s easy to imagine that this was a necessary leap forward – a move toward the verisimilitude we associate with the sound synched image, but what sound gave it also took away. Gone was the mobile camera, bold mise-en-scene, experimentation; in its place the clunky sound camera, with its sound proof hood, providing static compositions and flat angles. Compare and contrast F.W Murnau’s 1927 epic Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans with Tod Browning’s Dracula, released four years later, and you’re a witness to the devolution of the moving image. It would take a director called Orson Welles to successfully marry the human voice with the old artistry.
You sense that filmmakers, as a species, carry the guilt of their forefathers at that act of patricide. Every so often films are made as shrines to a slain parent; films that make the kids feel better about their dark past. The great ones, Sunset Blvd, one of the best movies ever made about movies, and Singin’ in the Rain, made the passing of silent film tragic, romantic; they cultivated a nostalgia and sense of lost innocence. The Artist certainly does both things, and it may be as good, but the difference is one of technique. This is a time capsule movie, a film that eulogises a period in the medium’s history using the storytelling idiom of the day. As such it belongs to the same sub-genre as Hobo with a Shotgun. These are movies directed to seamlessly slot into the canon of yesteryear but like the flicks themselves, this is an illusion. The Artist is a modern movie – digital even; it’s the comment it makes on a bygone era using the gift of hindsight that marks it out.
Hindsight shouldn’t, in this instance, be confused with post-modernism. There’s no ironic send up of silent film conventions; Michel Hazanavicius doesn’t imagine he’s more enlightened that Abel Gance. When the modern intrudes on the story of silent star George Valentin, and his usurpation by talkie sensation Peppy Miller, it’s to articulate his sense of having no voice in the sound era. The Artist allows us to experience the silent film star’s nightmare – to see and, more pertinently, hear it, for the first time.
In a virtuoso sequence, Valentin’s silent world is plagued by Foley; his brush makes a noise when he knocks it down, he can hear his footsteps as he moves, but he remains mute. The diegetic sound that’s become so familiar to modern audiences is given a sinister, non-diegetic aspect. Once we’re as conscious of it as Valentin, and how novel it is, the audience can have no doubt that this innovation is going to change the movies utterly. There could hardly be a more succinct comment on the transition to sound than George’s unnatural silence. That’s the moment we realise we’re looking at the future Norman Desmond. Even his driver, James Cromwell, looks like Eric Von Stroheim.
It’s a sequence that wouldn’t have been possible in the silent era; it marks its card as a modern movie. Other contemporaneous touches are more subtle but no less astute. The casting of Bérénice Bejo and Jean Dujardin in this Hollywood story acts as a welcome reminder of the internationalist flavour of silent cinema, both in front of and behind the camera. We’re reminded of the universality of silent film; a cinema without borders. When sound finally kicks in at the film’s close, Dujardin’s French accent plays like an earlier intertitle that read “Bang!”. What did we expect him to sound like? Maybe like Douglas Fairbanks, the actor he so closely resembles in his silent adventures – period swashbucklers and Zorro movies, but certainly not like a gallic waiter. The voice we’ve heard in our head, like the voice you hear when you read a character speak in a novel, is replaced. It’s a modern bit of punctuation, an annotation in the margin, which nails the anxiety felt by silent stars at the end of the twenties.
Sound demystified many a silent personality; it punctured the mystique. Their discipline, that physicality and gestural form of acting, now derided for its theatricality, was cast aside and forgotten. The artistry in The Artist comes from that craft; it’s a smouldering look, a routine in which Miller slips her arm into Valentin’s jacket and imagines the two embracing, or a simple recurring joke in which a dog plays dead every time it hears a noise like a gunshot. It may seem quaint to modern eyes but Hazanavicius is consciously reviving a sentimental, melodramatic form of storytelling that can still charm 90 years on. He re-educates our peepers to notice the care in staging that, though no less integral now, had greater primacy when the only words came on intertitle cards. Ludovic Bource’s chirpy, sometimes thunderous score reminds us that silent films were never silent.
Cineastes will want to see The Artist for its celebration of mothballed technique and those simple romantic virtues that are anathema to modern filmmaking. Everyone else should go anticipating a great movie. More than a pastiche, it tells the story of film in the late twenties and early thirties with style and heart, and a fascinating story it is. See it, but remember: no talking.
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