Written by Michel Hazanavicius
Starring Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell
Alfred Hitchcock made his first colour feature – Spellbound – in 1945. He made his last black and white feature – Psycho – in 1960. If colour was a leap forward, a natural progression for cinema (at least, affordable and natural colour; the first colour films go back to George Smith and William Friese-Greene* in the first years of the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that the technology became practical) then why go back to black and white? Why retrace one’s steps against the march of cinematic progress?
Because it looked better. In 1954, for the first time, the majority of American films were shot in colour; from that point onwards, every monochrome movie has been filmed that way deliberately, a conscious choice to reject colour film. Mostly, the reasons have been artistic: the bleakness of Schindler’s List, for instance, was augmented by its drab greys – although technical issues have sometimes reared their head, Martin Scorsese and Michael Chapman having photographed Raging Bull in monochrome primarily because of doubts over the quality of the available colour, particularly when transferred to television or the new-fangled VHS cassettes.
But technical concerns apart, there has always been, and will always be, a demand for the particular look of black and white film. It’s not that it’s better (or worse) than colour film; rather that it offers something different, it’s a quite separate approach to the art. Some films are best in black and white, others best in colour, and we should always credit the director who knows that their picture demands monochrome and sticks to his or her guns.
On the other hand, the second great technological breakthrough of that era has had a rather more absolute impact. From The Jazz Singer’s first introduction of sound† in October 1927, it took barely two years for Hollywood to write the silent world into history; once an alternative was available, silent movies were abandoned with haste, much like penny-farthings, or trepanning. Even cultures that had a long tradition of silent performance in the theatre, Japan and China, had committed entirely to talkies by the mid-30s.
How did silent become an unwanted relic when monochrome remains a cherished artistic approach? Why do silent films by Keaton, Griffith, Lang, Murnau, Eisenstein and Chaplin regularly feature in all-time lists by venerable organisations if they pale so starkly in comparison to the joys of sound? Why are performances of silent pictures so popular? Sadly, recognition of the wonders of silent cinema, and the unique and separate art in its creation, didn’t even begin to take hold until thirty-odd years after its demise, thirty-odd years after the debate between sound and silence was settled in the studios. Three decades were more than long enough to ensure that those beloved silent flicks are all from the ever-more-distant past, to ensure that silent cinema as a living breathing medium died in the 1920s, and all that we have are memories.
Not that I’m saying silent cinema is preferable to the talkies – rather, that the two are distinct artforms with their own merits. Just as the predominance of colour doesn’t mean there’s no room for black and white where black and white is necessary, so there is room for silent pictures to be enjoyed alongside their noisier counterparts.
(Well, I say noisier – of course, there never was anything silent about silent cinema. These were performances in the truest sense of the word, with live music and lively crowds. But I digress.)
There is room, there has to be room for silent pictures to be enjoyed and indeed produced, once in a while, when that is the medium most suited to the message. Studios need not be afraid, should a filmmaker come before them and insist that the proposed picture would be dialogue-free. But to convince the money in Hollywood, the wider industry, critics, and - crucially - audiences that silent film has much to offer as an artform, there would surely need to be one made anew that was exceptional, that showed all that silent cinema has to offer, and that managed to draw crowds and acclaim and awards. A unique and beautiful work to transcend the worlds of sound and silence and to breathe life into a dead art.
So, on behalf of all lovers of silent cinema, all those who can see what it offers that sets it apart from the talkies, thank you Michael Hazanavicius, for giving us something truly extraordinary. And The Artist is extraordinary indeed, a touching, charming, funny, magical love letter to the cinema. It is, inescapably, a movie about the movies, and the innocent wonder in the stream of light. There are some lovely little touches too: the decision to shoot in a good old-fashioned 1.37:1 aspect, the misspelling of a character's name in an early film credit (just look at any listing on IMDb - everyone has their name spelt wrong at the start of their career), the staggered credits in the opening title... everything is just right, crafted adoringly to tie the old magic to the too-often-ugly new world. It will have achieved a great deal if it persuades even one person to look deeper and find the lost beauty of a joy abandoned too soon. But quite apart from that, if no-one watches a solitary silent film because of this, then no matter. The Artist is glorious. It is glorious at the beginning of 2012. It would be glorious in October 1927, or at any point in between. Great cinema, great art is a wonderful thing, whether it has sound and dialogue or pristine silence.
*Friese-Green also developed a system for showing films in 3D in 1890. It didn't catch on.
†Not actually the first film with synchronised sound, but the first to introduce a practical and affordable solution. Strictly speaking, the first was Charles Taze Russell's The Photo-Drama of Creation (1914), which was little more than a (very long) slideshow coupled with a record of sound effects and narration, to be played simultaneously.
