Michael Hazanavicius’ The
Artist is a lavish love letter to old Hollywood cinema, but it is so much
more. It speaks volumes without ever saying a word. Shot in luscious black and
white and (mostly) silent, it harkens back to a time when film was a purely
visual medium, proves that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a
second of film is worth that times every one of its twenty-four frames, and
assures us that louder isn’t always better. At their simplest and quietest, movies
are sometimes the most magical.
Steeped in a bold, unapologetic and unashamed nostalgia, the
film chronicles the movie industry’s often painful transition to sound in the
late 1920s, and what happened to so many silent film stars when audiences
demanded they be heard as well as seen.
The Artist, which
spans a five year period, opens in 1927, when the sign in the hills still said
HOLLYWOODLAND, and dashing movie star George Valentin was on top of the world.
The public adored him and his arsenal of arched eyebrows and dazzling smiles almost
as much as he adored himself.
