Tweet The Artist (2011) a contemporary silent

Just saw The Artist last night in its second day in Charlottesville, Va. and found it charming and fun. It was pretty light weight, not what I would normally expect from an Oscar favorite, but then I haven't even seen an Oscar winning movie in the last thirty years. It's not going to replace Singin' in the Rain as my favorite movie about the era, but I liked the echoes of Doug Faribanks and John Gilbert in the character George Vallentin. It was cool to see an excerpt of the real Fairbanks doing a dive and roll over a cart in The Mark of Zorro. I don't know why it would not inspire interest in silents among audiences. My wife loved it, and although she's initiated into comedy (she loves Chaplin and likes Keaton), she reads whenever I watch a silent drama. But when the music gets dramatic I catch her her looking up to watch for a while. Maybe The Artist won't shake any new silents loose from the major studios, but I don't see why it shouldn't from Criterion or TCM and the Warner Archive, where there are still several they can release immediately, already scored or with music on film.

I was reflecting...

Maybe the "problem" with old, or stylized as old films, it's not just the fact they are old and of the contemporany fashion.

Maybe audience today lack some knowledge to put old films in perspective. Knowledge of history, social and cultural aspects of old times, to allow better understanding and appreciation of vintage films.

Of course many people today liked Public Enemies, but mainly because the stars like Johnny Depp, and the action, shotguns and rhythm. Similar with The Untouchable, Saving Private Ryan .

When we look for the 20's or 10's ... How many people today can understand the context of such eras ? I mean the socialogic, cultural, religious, politic, economic and technologic aspects and the film industry evolution itself.

So my question is: How The Artist can broke the barrier? Is the plot elaborated to ordinary expectators enjoy without doubts relatated to the aforementioned aspects?

If The Artist broke this barrier, how many other "stylized old" new production could have chance of success?

[Christopher Jacobs]

Somewhere I remember reading a number of years ago that the Coen Brothers were wanting to do a silent film but couldn't get financing for it. The did do a nice black-and-white film noir with THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE, but were required to shoot it on color film for foreign markets, even though it got a black-and-white release in the U.S. Maybe now they can finally get their silent project off the ground! Spielberg and Scorsese are other directors who might have the clout to do a silent film and could do the medium justice. (And of course there's the silent version of Gus Van Sant's new film RESTLESS, which is an admirable effort even if it should have had a silent film consultant to help edit it.)

From what I have been reading here, it seems that a lot of people would like a silent picture to be made much the same as they were in the 1920's. "The Artist" has been called a just OK film - not something special - or not something that would compare with the best of the 1920's productions.

I don't know what audience expectations are with a silent picture these days. I don't think you can make one exactly as one was made in the 1920's. Times have changed and if you portrayed love scenes the same way or even applied the same ordinary everyday values that existed in the 1920's - you would have everyone burst into laughter. "The Artist" may resemble a 1920's film - only because it is set in this era.

Jacques Tati made what I would call silent films in that all sound involved was a secondary consideration. The story was told in the visual alone. Granted his films were comedies and most silent pictures after the advent of sound have been comedies - with very few exceptions.

To make a silent drama set in modern day times would be difficult. The audience expectation of hearing the familiar sounds would take a lot of overcoming. Would it be necessary to photograph in monochrome - or narrow the screen to Academy? I don't think so.

Possibly there may be some experimentation with the silent medium again. Maybe the sound feature will be reduced to a minimum and the visuals again carry the story. Maybe concentration will again feature on photography and lighting. Maybe we'll see a whole new expressionistic stylisation? Maybe some actors and actresses will learn how to actually act?

To me the possibilities are endless and I hope that 'The Artist" may usher in a new look at motion picture making - getting back to the basics of creativity and showing us again a product that is worthwhile

Silents were getting really good before their demise but never reached their zenith. Sound came in too early and killed them off. There is a lot more that could be done with silent films given the right treatment.

People tend to forget that many modern popular music video clips with a story line are really silents shorts with music. So in sense they haven't entirely disappeared. But no one in the modern age has ventured further yet until this film.

I saw “The Artist” at the Art Deco Rivoli Cinema in Camberwell (a Melbourne suburb) today. They played it in the big cinema – it is now a complex. So it was nice, fairly large auditorium – that had curtains across the screen. We had to put up with the usual trailers and ads before the picture – but my biggest disappointment was that the screen masking tabs did not close from widescreen on to the academy ratio.

I was enchanted from the moment the titles came up (after all those logos and whatnot) – how marvelous to see the main titles at the start of a picture for a change and not superimposed over action. Then dramatic music starting to accompany the picture in a picture. This is a way of getting the audience enthused – a bit of excitement and dramatic music. What a thrill to see inside a picture theatre in 1927 with the film on the screen and a full orchestra in the pit playing to it. The audience all dressed! What a contrast to today when people decide to go out!

There are so many pluses in this film for me. I loved how George thinks about sound and then you suddenly start to hear all the cacophony that is round about us all the time. This was so brilliant and was if it was also a comment about how nice it is to hear an orchestra rather than noises and voices.

There were some other nice subtle touches. When George is wandering around in his state of encroaching dereliction – in the background there is a cinema with the film “Lonely Star” showing on the marquee.

There have been some comments about the film’s setting not being totally true to the era – some of the hairstyles and other minor points – well I noticed an electric gramophone with a record on it that looked as though it was going at 33 1/3 rather than 78. Minor points I think that did not detract from the whole. Generally I found that I felt that I was in the twenties and thirties – and of course all those beautiful motor cars!

The story line was simple and even a simpleton should be able to understand what is going on even though he or she may be knee deep in popcorn. Perhaps the simplicity of plot was tailor made for today’s modern audiences who have limited concentration? Even so, I found it quite delightful - good clean, wholesome entertainment of the type we haven’t seen on the screen for quite a while.

The music was not onomatopoeic or thematic but nevertheless worked most of the time. One thing - it was melodic and tuneful and not out of time with the era. I was not put off my the use of music that had been used in “Vertigo” – Good heavens! - in the time of the silents they used music from any source they could grab it from.

The one thing that struck home to me was just how much everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves – and this jumped out from the screen at me. George was effervescent and charming – yes, a cross perhaps between Douglas Fairbanks and John Gilbert and Peppy Miller was equally bubbly, coquettish and easy on the eye.

James Cromwell was his usual dour self and John Goodman managed to play his role as the movie mogul with not too much overplay – such as has been seen over and over again in pictures.

Uggie? What a wonderfully cute and clever doggie!

This picture proved to me that an effective silent picture could still be made today – and the fact that it is having such a success is wonderful - and may encourage the powers that be to dust off some of the older silents and show them again - properly - in large cinemas with full, live orchestral accompaniment.

I loved it. More please.

The story line was simple and even a simpleton should be able to understand what is going on even though he or she may be knee deep in popcorn. Perhaps the simplicity of plot was tailor made for today’s modern audiences who have limited concentration?

I think so. I think this may be part of the reason why The Artist often goes over better with people who rarely watch silents than ones who watch them a lot. When I watch silents with friends who rarely watch them, I'm often struck by how difficult it is for them to follow what seems like obvious plot points to me. In silents there were a lot of plot points that turn on visual cues that people today would expect to be accompanied by sound.

From what I have been reading here, it seems that a lot of people would like a silent picture to be made much the same as they were in the 1920's. "The Artist" has been called a just OK film - not something special - or not something that would compare with the best of the 1920's productions.

I have the opposite reaction. I would have much preferred that The Artist did not try so hard to to be like a typical 20's pictures. It's kind of the same feeling I have about remakes that are made shortly after the original and are barely changed. It's not that the remakes themselves are bad, it's that it's unncessary. There are so many possibilies in silent cinema that it seems a bit of a waste to re-tread like that. Chris Marker's work is something that comes in mind for me in terms of exploring the limits of silent cinema. I don't think it would be very obvious to most people that he's a silent film maker because his films are so radically unusual by any measure, but they are and it's exciting the things he did that could only be done as silent films. Perhaps some will beg to differ because his films have synchronized sounds, but I think what marks a film as a silent one is more the lack of synchronized dialogue rather than lack of synchronized sound.

Regardless of what I personally think of the film, it seems like all of award season buzz surrounding The Artist is making a lot of people talk and write about silent cinema, and for that I'm very glad.

Kevin Brownlow's micro-capsule review, which I ripped out of a USA Today article:

"It was expressive enough so that I could sit back and enjoy it in exactly the same way as a Colleen Moore picture or a similar film of the silent era. It has the spirit of the originals. I am very envious of the director. I would have loved to have made that."

I have to say I agree with Mr. Brownlow 1000%.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/movieawards/oscars/story/2012-02-17/silent-films-silent-performances-receive-oscar-attention/53123208/1

I may have mentioned this on another thread, but B&W stock is considered "specialty" work today and is prohibitively expensive for large print orders. When we did THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA in 2004, DeLuxe B&W release-print stock was literally more than five times as expensive as color stock. We had no choice. Of course, since LSoC was supposed to be a cheap-ass indie, the color shifts added to the experience, but it's definitely a drag for THE ARTIST (I've seen it both ways now.)

Mike S.

That's a pretty quick pricing shift, as in 1998-99 when I worked on an indie film shot in 35mm, the producer said it was substantially cheaper for them to shoot in black and white (I think they used either Plus-X or Tri-X or both). Of course they only had two or three prints made when it was done, and prints are always much more expensive in runs of anything less than about a hundred or more, often double what they cost per print in typical wide-release runs of 1000 or 2000+ prints. That also is likely changing rapidly as the wide releases start to have a larger percentage of digital copies on hard drives compared to the 35mm film prints.

Well, again, this was DeLuxe, a major lab, which was used to turning out literally thousands of prints a week, so to switch even one printer over to B&W (changing chemicals, timing tapes, etc.) was far more work-intensive than it would be for a small indie lab. It saved us money in an additional way: because SKELETON FROLIC was attached, we could print the whole schmear with one run and not have to print the cartoon separately and then splice it to the feature.

Mike S.

[Christopher Jacobs]

Well, again, this was DeLuxe, a major lab, which was used to turning out literally thousands of prints a week, so to switch even one printer over to B&W (changing chemicals, timing tapes, etc.) was far more work-intensive than it would be for a small indie lab. It saved us money in an additional way: because SKELETON FROLIC was attached, we could print the whole schmear with one run and not have to print the cartoon separately and then splice it to the feature.

Mike S.

I think they might have been using Fotochem or maybe Alpha Cine, or maybe somebody else. Anyway, I've finally seen THE ARTIST for myself on film, and while the the color balance shifts from reel to reel were obvious, I didn't find them as annoying as I expected. After the initial shock of the color change, they were easy to adjust to, and as I noted in another thread it was reminiscent of real black-and-white film with changeovers that didn't quite have the carbons adjusted exactly right from one projector to the next. I think the advantage with THE ARTIST was also how sharp and crisp the film print was, whereas I recall the color stock prints of SCHINDLER'S LIST being substantially softer and contrastier than the black and white prints. As far as THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVERA goes, I never got to see it on film in a theatre, only on DVD (found on a bargain shelf at Menards, of all places!), so I can't comment on those 35mm transfers (although if it originated on DV tape it would have been softish to begin with, color considerations aside).

Latest worldwide box office according to boxofficemojo.com: $61,298,523, over 4 times the production budget of $15 million. And it's still goin', folks...

[Christopher Jacobs]

Latest worldwide box office according to boxofficemojo.com: $61,298,523, over 4 times the production budget of $15 million. And it's still goin', folks...

Also, this weekend's gross appears (by Sunday night estimates) to be slightly higher than last weekend's gross (though only about $100) with the same number of theatres playing it and last weekend was a bit higher than the previous weekend which actually was playing on more screens. Oddly, the week they expanded to over a thousand theatres the grosses suddenly dropped, and are now picking up again with fewer screens. Since it opened here just this weekend, that means they're moving prints around to new theatres when it looks like attendence starts to drop, rather than putting out additional prints. That's the way movies used to be distributed way back when, and the same prints would run for months or years until they'd made the rounds. Unfortunately with a video release looming just two months from now, it's not likely to stay in theatres much past May and then only on a very few screens. A sweep at the Oscars next Sunday night will likely push up grosses for the next few weeks, and even a couple of Oscars should help it run a bit longer past its video debut for those who want to see it theatrically. But it's continuing to do respectable if not quite blockbuster business, and I'm certainly planning to get the Blu-ray during its first week of release.

A $15 million silent movie. Can you imagine a movie in the silent era costing $15 million? They could have reconstructed the entire city of Rome for BEN-HUR or the entire city of Paris for HUNCHBACK.

Latest worldwide box office according to boxofficemojo.com: $61,298,523, over 4 times the production budget of $15 million. And it's still goin', folks...

I don't think that factors in the ad campaign.

I know, that's why I specified "production budget". Still, that's pretty damn good I'd say. And Harvey himself said they've already made millions in profit from it.

A $15 million silent movie. Can you imagine a movie in the silent era costing $15 million? They could have reconstructed the entire city of Rome for BEN-HUR or the entire city of Paris for HUNCHBACK.

WINGS was a $17 million silent movie; the army gave the studio $15 million worth of locations, personnel and equipment, in 1927 dollars. And every penny is on the screen.

They'll be adding 200-400 screens this Friday, and even more next Friday after the awards. Clearly they're expecting a big boost from all the Oscar wins--and hopefully they're right.

Mike S.

I saw “The Artist” at the Art Deco Rivoli Cinema in Camberwell (a Melbourne suburb) today. They played it in the big cinema – it is now a complex. So it was nice, fairly large auditorium – that had curtains across the screen. We had to put up with the usual trailers and ads before the picture – but my biggest disappointment was that the screen masking tabs did not close from widescreen on to the academy ratio.

I too was disappointed by the lack of appropriate screen masking to accommodate the film's 4:3 aspect ratio. I saw the film twice in Toronto: on opening day at the Cineplex Odeon Varsity and again this past weekend at the AMC Yonge Dundas 24. Both venues would be considered the flagship houses for their respective chains in the city, and both should have known better.

I found this lack of attention to detail particularly galling at the Varsity, where the theatre and/or distributor had gone to the additional expense of hiring four very attractive male ushers in tuxedos to greet people before they entered the auditorium. These special ushers were stationed just beyond the box office and ticket takers and their job was to hand everybody a "playbill" for The Artist and to escort less-mobile patrons who had come to see that particular film to their seats. The effect was charming and added a delightful touch to what used to be called "going to a show."

four very attractive male ushers in tuxedos to greet people before they entered the auditorium. These special ushers were stationed just beyond the box office and ticket takers and their job was to hand everybody a "playbill" for The Artist and to escort less-mobile patrons who had come to see that particular film to their seats. The effect was charming and added a delightful touch to what used to be called "going to a show."

Gee! You're lucky! We haven't had ushers and usherettes at the pictures for over 30 years or more here in Oz. In fact you are lucky to find any front of house staff about at all - save from the lonesome soul who takes tickets for all auditoria in a roped off part of the foyer. If you arrive late when the house lights have gone down, you are left to stumble inside and fall over and break your leg all by yourself.

THE ARTIST is doing well here in the United States, far better than those lavishly colorful talkies, THE IRON LADY and MY WEEK WITH MARILYN. The latter, even with the draw of Marilyn Monroe in the title has only taken in $13 million in box office revenue in 13 weeks, compared to THE ARTIST's $28 million in 11 weeks. And THE ARTIST can only go upward this week, expanding its venues to include my local 1925 theater rwher it will be the first silent film shown since 1929.

I am glad to see that the snarky comments here about THE ARTIST have stopped since God ( Kevin Brownlow - the New Testament version, as Meryl might say) has pronounced it, good.

Well here's a snarky one for ya: The Artist was so predictable and cliched, I was actually upset with myself for not seeing Rescued by Rover coming down the line! In fairness, that scene had the only bit of inspired comedy in the entire movie.

One of the biggest problems with the music from Vertigo is that it's not even integrated well with the picture. Once the CD track ends, the music just stops completely in the middle of the scene, without a cue from the action; the next minute or so is mute as stuff then happens.

Luckily, you're wrong. :-P

Yesterday evening, The Artist won 6 awards at the French Academy Awards (Césars):

Best Film
Best Director
Best Actress (Bérénice Béjo)
Best Art direction
Best Cinematography
Best Music

[Christopher Jacobs]

Yesterday evening, The Artist won 6 awards at the French Academy Awards (Césars):

Best Film
Best Director
Best Actress (Bérénice Béjo)
Best Art direction
Best Cinematography
Best Music

Well, tonight's the night for the Oscar presentations and we'll see how many categories THE ARTIST duplicates from the various other awards it's received. I'm expecting it to win at least four or five of its ten nominations, and wouldn't be too surprised if it wins six to eight, but I doubt if it will win all ten.

I'm guessing Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Music, possibly Cinematography, and would like to see it win Original Screenplay, Editing, and Art Direction. I have a feeling Octavia Spencer will beat out Berenice Bejo for Supporting Actress (partly because she really was better), and rather expect costume design will go to ANONYMOUS, which is set in the showiest period for costume designers of the five period films nominated and was much more obviously impressive than the costumes for THE ARTIST. I'm a bit surprised it didn't get a nomination for Art Direction as well.

[Mike Gebert]

It also won at the Independent Spirit Awards last night. Right now I'm savoring the irony that not only will a silent black and white movie likely win Best Picture, but it was probably better to see it digitally (as I did) given the problems mentioned above with printing black and white movies on color stock. That's a head-twister, to be sure... for that authentic silent film look, nothing beats Sony 4K projection...

By the way, my mom saw all the Oscar shorts this weekend and is rooting for the other silent-inspired film, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Perhaps the mistakes of 1927-9 are being turned around at last. Onward silence!

I saw THE ARTIST last night for the second time when it finally came to my local circa 1925 theater. It was a treat seeing it in such a venue, but the film itself suffered being projected from a 35 mm print. There were times it seemed blurry, especially noticeable when title cards flashed, and greenish tints would come and go. The film, came off far better visually speaking, at my local multiplex. But the film going experience ... sitting in a center aisle seat in a real theater, with two side aisles, and a screen with a curtain, rather than in a claustrophobia inducing shoe box with the only aisle, 3/4 over to one side, and too many seats jammed as close together as possible - more than made up for the visual deficiences.

[Mike Gebert]

I think the title cards are deliberately given a slight overexposed fuzziness (to look dupey, which admittedly makes no sense, but somehow feels right)...

Hey, look that:


http://silentlocations.wordpress.com/20 ... rd-repost/


Locations...

Well, in the past few minutes 'The Artist' became the first silent in over 80 years to win an Academy Award, for Best Costume.

Too bad they didn't revive the Best Titles award, it would have been a shoo in.

Incroyable! Formidable! YOWZA!