4th EDITION

International Film Heritage Festival

Yangon, 4 – 13 November 2016
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The Artist
Michel Hazavinicius
France – 2011
The Artist
Cast: Jean Dujardin (George Valentin), Bérénice Bejo (Peppy Miller), John Goodman (Al Zimmer), James Cromwell (Clifton), Penelope Ann Miller (Doris), Missi Pyle (Constance)
Screenplay: Michel Hazavinicius
Cinematography: Guillaume Schiffman
Production: Studio 37, La Petite Reine, La Classe Américaine, JD Prod France 3, Cinéma Jouror Productions, uFilm, Canal+, CinéCinéma, France Télévision, Le Tax Shelter du Gouvernement Fédéral de Belgique
Language: English, French
Duration: 100 min
Color: Black and White

Synopsis: It’s 1927 and Hollywood’s darling male lead George Valentin is enjoying the success of his latest picture, The Russian Affair. Peppy Miller, an aspiring young actress, accidentally bumps into Valentin at the premiere and plants a kiss on his cheek as they are surrounded by photographers. “Who’s that girl,” the press are quick to inquire. Perhaps it is thanks to this chance encounter that Miller gets her first break. Meanwhile the Kinograph Studio is transitioning to sound. Valentin finds the entire notion of ‘talkies’ vulgar, breaks off his contract, and decides to produce and direct his own silent motion picture. Always on the lookout for fresh faces, Kinograph offers Peppy Miller a role in their talking pictures and her career takes off. Valentin’s film on the other hand is a complete flop, and just as the Great Depression hits hardest, he is bankrupt. Miller, however, has not forgotten what Valentin did for her career, and offers her help, though, now that his star has set, he has to decide where and how he fits into the Hollywood dream machine.

Notes:
The Artist is not just about black-and-white silent movies; it is a black-and-white silent movie, and therefore, counterintuitively perhaps, it might be productive to talk about its sound. In The Artist, music is as important a character as the lead actors and Uggy the terrier. For the award-winning score, director Hazanavicius entrusted the work to his frequent collaborator, French film composer Ludovic Bource, and hired a fine European orchestra, the Brussels Philharmonic, to perform it. lf the whole movie is, as Hazanavicius has often said, a love letter to cinema, then the music is a special billet-doux to the great composers of Hollywood, including Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, and Charlie Chaplin, and the longstanding tradition of film composers shamelessly lifting ideas from the great classical repertoire of composers like Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninov, and so on.

Many of the films in this year’s edition of Memory! deal with themes of technological progress and its social consequences. In that regard there is, in The Artist, an eerie contemporary resonance in the story of a man being brought down because he refuses embrace a new technological revolution. As Canadian critic Rick Groen has put it, “lots of once-venerable institutions, and the folks who inhabit them, are feeling the pain of that haplessly silent actor, faced with rapidly evolving technology that liberates and enslaves but, either way, issues a non-negotiable demand: learn and adapt or fade into irrelevance and die… The result, then, is a silent film that dramatizes, wonderfully, the inevitable demise of silent film – that is a picture that uses old technology to dazzling effect to illustrate the insistent conquest of a new technology. It’s like encountering a Proustian tome about Twitter. Suddenly the charming gimmick seems to cut more deeply and closer to home.”

Music here has gone from a craft element – like special effects or cinematography or editing – to an art form. Most film music today is employed to direct our emotions and to regulate our heartbeats. But in The Artist music is perhaps the most authentic storyteller of all, the omniscient narrator we trust. Without the music, the part of the movie where Valentin hits bottom would seem insincere, grossly sentimental, superficial, cliché. The music gives it gravitas and richly evokes the particular character of a man who once owned Hollywood and now lives on nothing but whiskey and memories. The music authenticates our emotional grasp of a high flyer brought down by his own blind hubris; the pain, the loss, the loneliness we feel are as genuine as if they were our own. And if, as Hazanavicius insists, the silent movie is an emotional cinema, a sensorial event, then music is the silent movie maker’s most powerful tool, because, at its core, music is pure emotion in sound because, as Rilke says, music is “language where language ends.” Where language ends we move into another dimension of feeling, of experience, not of the intellect but of the heart.

The Artist was the darling of the 2011-2012 award season. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Original Music Score. In the run-up to the Oscars, it took three major Golden Globe awards, including one more for Best Original Score. At the Cannes Film Festival, where The Artist had its premiere, Jean Dujardin was named Best Actor. And all this for a movie where the only sound you’ll hear is the musical score, except for a few very brief and memorable exceptions.

Notes drawn from Friesen, Eric. “Music: The Language of The Artist.” Queen’s Quarterly no. 1 (2012): 19.