The Sound & Silence of "The Artist"

It’s 1927 and silence is dying out in Hollywood. As George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) fades into obscurity, in come the talking stars, the young Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) leading the bunch. But Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist prolongues the silence indefinitely, first into 1929 and the Depression, when basically all movies have switched to dialogue, then into the 30s and finally, by way of this film, into our own 21^st century; in short, it makes silence the active storyteller of the future that resisted it. Is The Artist a magic trick, a kind of narcissistic regurgitation? Is it only artificially alive? In all the ways it is and isn’t, Hazanavicius’ experimental film is singularly modern.

On a basic narrative level the movie sets out to tell the story from the losing side, as some sort of mythological cinematic response to “talkies” eighty years after their invention. The film’s playfulness – its sweet revenge – is in greeting the coming of spoken words with silence; the official story is being told anew, and the retelling complicates the bigger picture. Hazanavicius’ craftsmanship is pleasurably freeform, and The Artist is perpetually willing to laugh at itself and the films it loves, good and bad. (“I never loved you!” George says to his costar in a movie inside the movie, as he’s preposterously engulfed by the sand; and it’s as funny as it is disturbing). It continually implicates the audience. And it’s quick to fall in love with itself, only to gently snap out of it. Its childlike, primitive sense of film romance is the first thing we intuitively respond to.

In an early scene, shortly after our protagonist has been made aware of the impending threat of “talkies”, sound itself makes a crucial appearance. Simple noises that in any other context would be fundamentally inexpressive feel genuinely ominous here, as George Valentin realizes that everything around him makes a sound; we’re facetiously turned into cinematic territorialists. Sound is made to feel both invasive and exhilarating; it’s as if the whole contradictory (and up to now, theoretical) feelings we associate with its arrival were playing out at once. It’s the point where The Artist reveals itself to be not a silent film, but to be nervously playing one on the verge of disappearing. The nightmarish sequence has psychological disquietness; the familiar noises point to an incomprehensible world. Then the camera zooms in on George’s anguished silent scream and the film loses its genial innocence. For the first time its silence feels like despair.

Sound isn’t the only exotic element in this recreated atmosphere. Bérénice Bejo is a delightful, obviously contemporary presence, and her smile fills up the screen as vividly as the timeless Jean Dujardin, who is as magnificent a showman as he is an actor, as when he’s magically rediscovering himself as an spectator in the movie audience, watching one of Peppy’s talkies (George’s been downgraded from the screen to the seats). He’s both worlds at once. If their love story isn’t revolutionary, it’s not intended to be. The real infatuation here is with the filmmaking itself – which gives The Artist its dramatic, comedic, and filmic verbe – where 20s, 30s and 40s aesthetics mingle freely and exuberantly. It’s about discovering the tension in the form(s), between images and sounds, faces and words. Like the best of French films, The Artist merrily acknowledges its artifice.

The film’s climax (following a very busy action/dramatic sequence) offers up maybe the most haunting moment, when Ludovic Bource’s score disappears altogether and all we are left with are the faces. Peppy’s come to save George from ruin. It’s one glorious, daring moment of full silence, and it’s impactful. It informs our notion of what the film is communicating as fully as the early sequence where sound is born; silence in The Artist has been joyful before, at times helpless, but now it’s something else. The acquaintance with sound gives silence renewed expressiveness. Once the soundtrack is violently removed, as in this short sequence, the images come to life with astonishing clarity. The contrast speaks louder than any accumulation of noise.

Great silent movies give one the uncanny feeling of seeing the ghosts of people and things, and it’s not just because everyone who was ever in a silent is probably dead today. They know how to look beyond the words and the faces. Guillaume Schiffman, the cinematographer (another wizard), gives us a sustained shot of a staircase where Bejo and Dujardin stand still in a sea of people going up and down. It’s the notion The Artist has of simultaneous entrapment and merciless movement, and this image, like others in the film, feels inhabited in the same ghostly way silents do. (For Hazanavicius, entrapment goes both ways, whether it’s clinging to the past or submissive adherence to new techonology). It is curiously fitting for a movie driven by invention, not nostalgia, to greet the future with a certain suspiciousness. The ending gives in to history: the silent becomes the talkie. But in refusing to take sides, The Artist joyfully remains very much its own thing, unwilling to limitate itself to sound or silence. Its irreverence is a gesture.

Bernardo Bertolucci's 'The Last Emperor' (1987)

A glittering Hollywood specialty made by Europeans: the all-encompassing 20^th century epic, this time with China as cultural fetish. It gobbles up everything from the end of the ancestral customs and the conflict with the Japanese to the onset of World War II and the new communist regime. There isn’t much humanity in between, and the final scene, which has a bunch of foreign tourists entering the mythical halls of the extinct emperors, may not be such a bad summation of a movie that feels like a trip to the museum.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic follows the story of the last Chinese emperor, Pu Yi. The bulk of the film takes place in the interiors of the Forbidden City, an island in a time of revolution and change, and the only place where Pu Yi is still the accepted emperor. You’d need a cryptologist to tell you if we’re supposed to treat Pu Yi as a tragic or merely clueless figure, because the film doesn’t seem to be saying much about him with any clarity. We know he grows up believing himself to be superior to everyone and the movie tells us he ends up feeling the opposite way by the end, but it’s an enigma how he got there. His fundamental narcissism (sole sustenance of the Forbidden City) has been in a way imposed on him, and he isn’t freed from it (unconvincingly) until late in life. But the vague glimpses of character growth are drowned out by the opulent grandeur that drives the film.

The truest sign of character in the movie is harboured by the sets and the colors of the Forbidden City, a location so alien that Bertolucci can’t help but to abandon himself to its relentless exoticism. Vittorio Storaro, his brilliant cinematographer, uses the foreign atmosphere to exalt us visually – the camera floats through the curtains that separate the insular palace from the world outside. The lighting complements the art direction spectacularly, with bold reds and yellows worthy of both director and photographer. where Pu Yi is still the accepted emperor. You’d need a cryptologist to tell you if we’re supposed to treat Pu Yi as a tragic or merely clueless figure, because the film doesn’t seem to be saying much about him with any clarity. We know he grows up believing himself to be superior to everyone and the movie tells us he ends up feeling the opposite way by the end, but it’s an enigma how he got there. His fundamental narcissism (sole sustenance of the Forbidden City) has been in a way imposed on him, and he isn’t freed from it (unconvincingly) until late in life. But the vague glimpses of character growth are drowned out by the opulent grandeur that drives the film.

Perhaps the glamour of these surroundings is designed to compensate for the sheer ugliness of the washed out communist “look” that dominates the film’s latter segments. (Communism in epic films resists aestheticization even more vigorously than nazism or fascism, but romanticization of monarchies and empires is mandatory). We are told the old empire was as corrupted as the newly imposed regime (which seems bleak, alright), but it’s borderline cruel to be asked to judge the extravagance and ostentatiousness of an ancient foreign culture when we are constantly being assaulted with its poetic magnificence. It’s not there for us to love it or hate it, or even mourn it when it’s gone; it’s there for us to gaze at its imperial beauty, because that’s precisely what fascinates the filmmakers on a primal level. The movie tries to have it both ways, however, so intellectually it portrays China as hopelessly backwards in both the old and the new political scenarios, going from implicit to explicit barbarism, though it doesn’t seem the slightest bit interested in the violence or the motivation behind change – a shocking realization coming from Bertolucci. We barely see how things affect Pu Yi, if at all. Even the passing of the millenary traditions seems dreadfully inconsequential.

Bertolucci is in love with texture; when his films work, the psychological and the aesthetic are one and the same. But here, the moments that please the senses are fleeting, suspended images. This artless, bloodless film does however manage to end suggestively; when Pu Yi, no longer emperor anywhere, witnesses the people taking part in a new kind of hero worship, with everyone robotically but loudly celebrating their leader Mao Zedong. Substituted by politics and the age of the masses, Pu Yi’s story fades out with little glory or pomp.

On Vanessa Redgrave's 'Julia'

'Spoilers' towards the end...

Fred Zinnemann’s Julia is as much about the moral crisis of mid-20^th century Europe as it is about the dichotomy between its two central characters; American writer Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) and her politically active friend, the elusive Julia (Vanessa Redgrave). The point of view is Lillian’s, and we get a firsthand account of her writers’ block, her long days of typing and isolation by the beach, and her subsequent success as a playwright, leading up to the blinding glitz of fame. The backdrop to all this is a growingly violent Europe, where somewhere Julia is involved in the fight against fascism.

In our first glimpses of Julia – all in brief flashbacks, tenderly lit – she is endowed with such incendiary high spirits that it’s easy to reduce her entire self to a passionate symbol of rebellion. Yet Julia’s romanticism is but the great initial impression of her character; it stems from Lillian’s worshipping memory and is very much a construct of ideals frozen in time. Vanessa Redgrave, a natural fit to support these elevated feelings, goes beyond being an outsider’s realization. She is her own towering ideal, and when she recites the poetry that's been written with her in mind, she knows herself to be fully worthy of it.

Through these memories, we come to know a bit about Lillian and Julia’s childhood and the latter’s emerging social conscience in the midst of an oppresively aristocratic environment. Julia grows to become an intellectual, and finally, an activist and fighter, widely viewed as a raging communist by the society from which she sprang. But the passion that drives her in these melancholy remembrances is not merely for the communal. Redgrave expresses, too, the individualistic fervor that comes with knowing one’s place and one’s worth in a time of great significance. The belief in a future that would soon be dead both excites and fuels her; she is almost too airy, too possessed by exalted notions, when she tells Lillian about Vienna and the glory of its possibilities, as if she were repeating them to herself.

The bulk of the film takes place in 1930s Europe, chronicling Hellman’s creative struggle, but the movie really gets going when Julia asks Lillian to smuggle money into Berlin to support one of her causes. Lillian is Jewish, and at this point in the film, Germany is already under Hitler’s grip. The journey to Nazi Germany is fraught with tension on a character level; Jane Fonda sees us through it, with the natural uneasiness and hesitation of someone who has been out of the real world for too long. Everyone is suspicious of one another to the point where she becomes physically suffocated. It is Fonda’s interpretation that grounds the film and in a way makes sense of Julia.

It is only when Lillian and Julia finally meet again that one becomes aware of the fullness of Redgrave’s creation. The Julia near the end is the aftermath of the life of active participation that she'd dreamt of all her life. Movingly, the idealism is gone, but in its place there is a humanity - a kind of tirelessness - that is transfixing in its simplicity and knowingness. She becomes a poetic creation in a new, deeper way: experience has grounded her and expanded her understanding. Though a world of suffering is delineated in her face, she is more striking than ever, and in her conversation with Lillian she shows a heightened empathy and awareness. When she casually mentions her child, she overwhelms the screen with feeling, oddball laughter suddenly springing from her. And yet something about her seems doubly as unreachable as before. She gently but forcefully reminds Lillian that time is running scarce, that there's none for tears and hardly any for friendship. A lonely struggle has wounded her; she's accepting of her fate but it haunts her all the same. She is someone who's been abandoned. Life has deprived her of self-aggrandizement, but it has, in turn, made her inaccesible to others and to Lillian in new ways. Lillian, meanwhile, has become a kind of tool for purposes that to Julia might seem vastly more urgent (though no less dear) than any friendship.

Despite the layers and the evolution in Redgrave’s perfomance, there is still a temptation to understand her character in basic “Romantic heroine” terms. Even the film may encourage this view, which on the whole is not on Redgrave’s level - it is too delicate, too polished, and too disorderly to have the devastating effect it seeks to impart on us. But it holds one hell of a gem inside it, a character who remains a mystery (but by the end no longer a fanciful or unbelievable one), solitary proof of human fortitude in a time when cowardice and inaction thwarted humanism.

Perpetual Western: Unforgiven (1992)

Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven strips the Western of all the things that make it enjoyable on a pulp level. He gives us haunted figures instead - real people made out of the heroes and myths of the past – and leaves them to play in all the familiar settings. But even the landscapes have ceased to be playgrounds for heroism; the empty skies are reminders of what once was, while thunder haunts like Sin from youth. More than mere deconstruction, Unforgiven comes close to being that very rare monster, the humanist Western.

It’s not humanized simply because the violence is no longer enjoyable in a visceral way; it’s human because it acknowledges the inner rage and the unstoppable cycle of violence in all its characters down to the last whore in the house. It’s there in Frances Fisher’s eyes when she demands the cowboy who’s cut up the prostitute’s face be hanged; it’s there again in Gene Hackman’s face, whose desire to be done with violence only ends up giving it continuity; and in the desire of the young to prove themselves and in the hopeless conviction of Eastwood’s character to get away from it forever.

But because Eastwood gives these people real scars and real fears and desires, Unforgiven isn’t just a moral thesis on an ancient genre. It’s alive and enjoyable like the best of them and almost as lived in as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, though it distances itself from that movie’s thoroughly modern temperament. Unforgiven feels more like watching the death of an old myth, and despite the level of realism achieved, it has a pictorial mythic grandeur.

Then it’s all turned against us. In a perversely long and static sequence – the movie’s best – the film’s spirit seems to morph from the inside out. As the Schofield Kid tells Eastwood how it feels to kill a man for the first time (alternatively laughing and weeping, his adolescent feelings all mixed up) a lonely rider approaches them both from the distance, slowly. Eastwood cuts between the young man and the rider intuitively; the rider almost seems like a ghost. What is this thing riding towards us just as the final horrifying implications of violence are being thrown at us in what seems like the end of the Western as we know it? Turns out to be a woman carrying news Morgan Freeman’s character Ned Logan – Eastwood’s best friend - has died in the most vicious way imaginable.

Before you know it, the Western is back, and the movie’s driving force is no longer melancholia, but the eternal thirst for vengeance. The movie’s final moments are like an explosion of violence long repressed, though I don’t know if it’s catharsis or tragic inevitability; probably both.

This is Eastwood at his most detailed and complicated. He has, at least partially, humanized the Western, but in the same movie at the same time there are unnerving implications that the Western can never be humanized or it ceases to exist as such. It lives on in a kind of perpetual, closed in state, as suffocated by the sun and the wind as its dwindling heroes.

Los abrazos rotos (2009)

A great director's ode to cinema is nearly always a source of fascination for everybody else, but perhaps this confusing, terribly incomplete film can only go as far as to fascinate Almodóvar himself, whose direction seems assured even when the story has none to speak of. Los abrazos rotos is meant to be Almodóvar at his most obsessive and passionate, but he tries to squeeze melodrama out of drama that isn't even there to begin with; there's no tension to anything, rendering all bombastic emotion weightless. Lluís Homar and Blanca Portillo are the movie's earthbound protagonists, while Penélope Cruz plays movie star. Three years after earning with Volver a place in movie lore, and now an Oscar winner and a power to be reckoned with in her own right, Almodóvar here mysteriously chooses to reduce her to "mere" iconography. She's Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale, but she's only wearing their masks. When her performance comes to life, the movie, too, becomes a movie and not just an obsession; and there's a terrific scene where, in all out Magnani mode, she viciously and maniacally assaults the camera that is shooting her. (It quite explicitly suggests the love/hate relationships that movie stars have with images, fame, and their own reflections.) The fragmented nature of the story may make it hard for the film to soar, but when it does work, one gets glimpses of what the director is so powerfully drawn to: the affectionate way with which he references the folly of the movies (its tendency to glamourize); its transformative nature, turning ugliness into beauty, drama into comedy; and the eternity of the image itself, making it possible to relive and to return. Most haunting of all is an image of Homar and Cruz kissing, with that unmistakably grainy, blurry VHS quality to it, the stillness of the moment seeming both palpable and out of reach.

From "Wall E" (2008) to "Up" (2009): Pixar's Earthly Gesture

Is there something more suggestive, more expressive of the times, than the initial scenes of Wall E, the camera zooming in on a wasted, rotten Earth? The view is both post-apocalyptic and sweetly nostalgic for the lost humanity, the city sounds. And at the same time, it has nostalgia for the forgotten expressiveness of the silent cinema, a cinema of feeling through images. Wall E has, for the first half of its running length, no human faces, but it is full of feeling and humanity to a degree that maybe no other movie this decade can make claim to (give or take a Miyazaki movie), and its preoccupation for the future is in no way overshadowed by its lament of the past (and present).

Surely, Wall E embodies this era of global warming and capitalism gone mad with the humor and warmth that is so characteristic of Pixar, but most of all and most terrifyingly, Wall E is about the mechanization of the human condition. What's so frightening and so enchanting about it is that the feelings are all post-human: the humans themselves no longer feel anything; it is Wall E, with a Chaplinesque sense of humanity, that is not robotized. Wall E represents us all, or at least the best about us; he's a decaying little thing, broken down and isolated, but with a fundamental, special curiosity about him that makes him alive. He's the remnants of humanity; the robot is the only thing that has survived mechanization. This sweet little commentary on man's irrational fear of machinery --while the real robotization is happening right now, to our own human experience-- runs through the whole movie masterly, delicately; it's a grand, beautiful gesture. And it's also about contact with the universe: though the post-human humans of Wall E live off grand technology and spaceships on autopilot, the beauty of space is hardly corrupted by their inanity. It becomes the playground for Wall E and EVE to make love, as it were, in a sequence of celebration of the universe. If we're on the verge of a grander, cosmic era, Wall E, too, carries a current uncertainty, a sense of joy and mischief mixed with a fear of ourselves when we get there.

The movie isn't as strong in the spaceship sequences; the "humans" are all too crudely written, and the rhythm sometimes changes abruptly, but maybe it's logical for the scenes of crazed consumerism to just not have the poetry of the others (it would be a lie if they did). Wall E and EVE are such great characters, and their romantic entanglement is so new and amazing, that it doesn't much matter anyway (Wall E brings back the comic invention of the silent era; EVE's what Katharine Hepburn would be like if she were an iPod). It's slapstick comedy reinvented. And who can forget the last scene, when Wall E has lost his memory, and all of a sudden he's no more than an inert, useless piece of metal; maybe the haunting underlying is that without the memory of what was lived, the humanity is killed, its feeling eradicated. In the end, EVE brings him back to life, of course, just as it should be.

It's a curious, but welcome choice for the animators behind Pixar to have switched their attention from the vast space and the wasted Earth of Wall E to the exuberant blues and greens of the South American jungle in their latest, Up. Up is shrouded, like the previous movie, with a sense of urgency, but moreso than Wall E, it has an awareness of mortality. It openly acknowledges death, not just in the figure of Carl Fredrickson's wife, whose memory pushes him to go on his adventure, but also in the story of Kevin, the strange, supposedly prehistoric bird on the verge of becoming extinct. Up doesn't have the magic or the almost avant-garde edge of Wall E, but it's more current that many people give it credit for. Its commentary on adventure, and the different kinds of adventure to be had, is quite lively and enchanting. Part of the beauty of this flawed film is how it grows to show adventure as both the most wonderful and joyful thing imaginable, fueled by imagination and curiosity; but also as a thing of potentially great evil, which happens when ambition goes wrong. In an ironic gesture worthy of Pixar, the misunderstood idolized hero of the protagonist ends up being the villain; the villain, too, shares the love for adventure, but he functions in much the way a conquistador works, his joy is in domination, while Carl's joy is in life. And once again, much like Wall E, our hero is a fragile old thing in danger of becoming mechanized; the only reason he doesn't become a cynic is because of the memory of life. (What Pixar shares with traditional animation is that curiosity creates life, but the morals are more complicated). Up explodes with the full colors and raging sunsets of the jungle; none of the smog and death of Wall E shows through, and the rhythm is faster, more traditionally adventurous. But its adventure's shaded with mortality; maybe it's not just Kevin the bird who's in danger of becoming extinct, but something rather entirely bigger. And it's beautiful to see Pixar register in Up the world with all its vitality just as in Wall E it paints its most critical side, a kind of restless worldly melancholy seeping through.

Aparajito (1956)

[Spoilers ahead]

A new rhythm emerges in the second part of the Apu trilogy. The lost in time spaces of Pather Panchali are replaced by cities, crowds, buildings, and the feel of machinery. But Satyajit Ray's vision, far from becoming mechanized, thrives in this new environment. It's edited faster, shot more vividly, accompanying the new sensations and ways of life experienced by the young Apu and his parents (the actors are all excellent). The core of the movie is the tension between family and the security of the old life, and youthful ambition and the uncertainty of the future. Because Ray is a masterful director, this tension is always present, and it imbues everything with extra meaning, but it's never made explicit; the scenes just breathe and keep adding up.

There are scenes of simple, exuberant joyfulness as Apu plays in the city and initiates contact with the world; they are juxtaposed with the fears and weariness of the mother, who wishes the best for his son, but expects him to become a priest like his father. In one sequence the father lies ill in bed as Apu sits by his side; there are fireworks outside and the father tells him to go and join the other kids. The simplicity of such exchange can leave you elated when, a few moments later, the father dies and Apu's childlike gesture, the desire to go see the fireworks in the sky, is tingled with the face of death. And so the movie keeps evolving before you, in very simple touches, and one starts to realize the true scope of the tale; a tale of a country in a period of change, torn between tradition and a modern world, a new world imposed, perhaps, a little too quickly. But the world has changed and the movie is also about the way the desire to get to know it and get to take part in it begin to form inside Apu.

The shockingly human characters in Aparajito are also compassionately incomplete. In the most haunting sequence, the mother rises from the old tree in the countryside, believing to have heard Apu's voice back in the house (at this point he's been absent for a long time). But nothing is there; she searches the house and the trees, but they're dark and silent, except for the fireflies that begin to fill the screen. It may be the only moment in the trilogy when reality becomes confused; there's something sublimely sad about it, inexplicable, about this empty nature, filled by fireflies where once there was her son. The mother dies without seeing Apu for a last time, and having never told him about her sickness; and Apu, in turn, is broken, but immediately goes back to Calcutta to his exams, and to the future. The mother's death suggests the lonely passing of the ancient grandmother in Pather Panchali, which was in turn like the passing of an era. And now the mother too, closes another chapter. Apu's roots have died out, except, perhaps, in himself. But Ray's artistry has only become magnified: the two movies, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, nurture each other wonderfully, and now the sense of magic is twofold: in the first movie, the train in the fields signaled another world coming, and in the context of the jungle and the life there it had the feeling of something new and strange. And now we get to know the new and strange, and the old world keeps coming back to us: in the traditions, the spirituality, in the tree of the ancient roots where his mother dies and where Apu laments her death before returning to his studies. The different feelings, the distinct worlds that seem to not quite fit, become increasingly confused and in turn, richer: they respond fully to one another.