Silent film gets loud applause at Cannes
Source: Agencies |
May 16, 2011, Monday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE talk at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday was about the movie that doesn't talk - a silent film about a 1920s Hollywood star toppled by the age of talkies.
French director Michel Hazanavicius' "The Artist" employs lush music, well-chosen but restrained sound effects and no spoken words save in one brief scene.
The result is an old-timey comic melodrama about the pitfalls of artistic pride and the power of romantic redemption that earned sustained applause at its first press screening, a rarity for notoriously snooty Cannes critics.
A last-minute addition to the lineup of 20 films competing for the festival's top honor, the Palme d'Or, "The Artist" is shot in black and white, conveys its limited dialogue through silent-movie title cards and is presented in the boxy format of early cinema instead of today's widescreen panoramas.
"We live in a time when people are crazy about 3-D films, people are crazy about technical innovation. Everything seems to be focused on images, and suddenly someone wanted to tell a very odd tale using this format that is a silent movie in black and white," the film's producer Thomas Langmann said before its premiere last night.
Hazanavicius pored over classics from the silent age and decided that such a mix was vital to a story told virtually without words.
"I looked at them a lot to understand the rules of the game, and very quickly, I realized that comedy, and ironic comedy furthermore, would not hold water over an hour and a half," Hazanavicius said.
"A silent film moreover imposes a certain way of experiencing the film on the spectator, so melodrama and a love story fit best with that format. (Charlie) Chaplin is above all a comic, but all his feature films are melodramas with some little snippets of humor," he said.
(AP)
French director Michel Hazanavicius' "The Artist" employs lush music, well-chosen but restrained sound effects and no spoken words save in one brief scene.
The result is an old-timey comic melodrama about the pitfalls of artistic pride and the power of romantic redemption that earned sustained applause at its first press screening, a rarity for notoriously snooty Cannes critics.
A last-minute addition to the lineup of 20 films competing for the festival's top honor, the Palme d'Or, "The Artist" is shot in black and white, conveys its limited dialogue through silent-movie title cards and is presented in the boxy format of early cinema instead of today's widescreen panoramas.
"We live in a time when people are crazy about 3-D films, people are crazy about technical innovation. Everything seems to be focused on images, and suddenly someone wanted to tell a very odd tale using this format that is a silent movie in black and white," the film's producer Thomas Langmann said before its premiere last night.
Hazanavicius pored over classics from the silent age and decided that such a mix was vital to a story told virtually without words.
"I looked at them a lot to understand the rules of the game, and very quickly, I realized that comedy, and ironic comedy furthermore, would not hold water over an hour and a half," Hazanavicius said.
"A silent film moreover imposes a certain way of experiencing the film on the spectator, so melodrama and a love story fit best with that format. (Charlie) Chaplin is above all a comic, but all his feature films are melodramas with some little snippets of humor," he said.
(AP)
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