Silent Film Is All The Rage | The Artist (Barbican Cinema) | Making Tracks

THE ARTIST: COMMENT

Some movies nowadays fire off images, speech and music at machine-gun pace. Films are more crowded than ever. Let’s say the elements of movies were people. If two’s company, three’s a crowd, does losing the interfering dialogue make the perfect relationship?

An unexpected zeitgeist has crept up on us in the midst of 3-D film and ever more ambitious CGI. Londoners have developed a nostalgia for film as it was in the days of silent black-and-white, limelight and creaking cinematographs. See here for listings of silent films in London. People have been playing with pictures for centuries, as the early cinema website tells us. Now, our curiosity for the post-1900 strides from silent film to colour television and now to the digital age is enjoying a sudden wave of curiosity, as is the relationship between pictures on-screen and the soundtrack.

THE ARTIST

Let’s take the current most famous example; The Artist, seen by this writer in the warm City haven of the Barbican Centre Cinema. It’s a phenomenal, deeply affectionate tribute to silent cinema’s giddy heyday. Bérénice Bejo plays wannabe screen siren Peppy, who accidentally gets her big movie break alongside strong, silent star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin). She capitalizes upon it to become the darling of new ‘talkies’. This all comes at the expense of the suddenly outmoded George and his loveable canine companion – George and Peppy clearly wrestle with their mutual attraction and pride but (classy to the end) never so much as kiss.

If you don’t cry when the bankrupted actor sets fire to all his films, only to be saved by his dog, then you are a harder-hearted person than this writer. Director Michel Hazanavicius has his timing and his cinematography down to a ‘T’. The emotions are extreme, the shot sequences are inventive, the comedy subtle and beautifully self-aware; the line ‘Out with the Old! Make way for the new’ has a wonderful irony, smugly reminding us that we are watching something that should feel out of date. It doesn’t.

The full-blown orchestral score (by Ludociv Bource) is in a class of its own. More well-placed tremolandos, brass tunes and sweeping violins than you can shake a stick at, with perfectly judged momentum. Billie Holiday‘s ‘Pennies from Heaven‘ is the only song to feature – I didn’t find it especially memorable and I’m not entirely sure why it’s included seeing as it was released in 1936 and The Artist is set around the 1929 Great Depression. This is a minor point, however.

Some of the best film directors of all time made their mark with black-and-white films; think Claude Chabrol and Alfred Hitchcock.  But The Artist does not rip anyone off. Even Peppy is not obviously based specifically on one star (Greta Garbo, for example), but the archetype of all gorgeous young 1920s starlets. It has a distinctive brand of wit, using scenery to reflect characters’ moods (see the cinema billing ‘Lonely Actor’ and film title ‘Guardian Angel’), taking us into George’s hallucinations and using surprising camera angles sparingly but effectively – for example when George pours his drink onto his reflection.

It uses sound to surprise us; George’s glass suddenly makes a sound when he puts it down and we’re as shocked as he is. We’ve forgotten that it’s possible for any noise to exist apart from the orchestral soundtrack.  In fact, it reminded me of the famous moment (rather more tragic) in Schindler’s List, when a touch of red at the end is the only colour in the film. It’s excruciatingly painful to watch and is felt more keenly than if there had been any previous colour.

The Artist has already won four Critics Choice awards, but if it also scoops any of the six Golden Globe nominations – including best musical or comedy and best director – it will be well deserved. It reminds us that films can be stylish without being visually extravagant or technologically pioneering, and that music evokes our emotions and tells a story as well as dialogue. In fact, I would argue it hits harder, with no words in the way. The Artist might also be going on tour with its European Film Award-winning score performed live.

LONDON’S LIVE EVENTS | MAKING TRACKS

It’s right that The Artist is making such a storm, but not right to ignore home-grown cinema outfits who are also experimenting with the use of silent film, and a distinctive score. It’s worth mentioning that Travelling Light has just opened at the National Theatre. Nicholas Wright‘s new play is about a young Eastern European, circa 1900, who transforms the lives of his villagers with motion pictures and apparently invents editing. It’s a touching, if naively acted, testament to the wonder in which people held movies in their early days.

But back to cinema: Making Tracks, a collaboration between Whirlygig cinema and The Cabinet of Living Cinema – an eclectic group of musicians who perform live scores to short films. They’ve become a mainstay at Shoreditch’s Rich Mix, but their January 14th visit was well timed, dialogue-less film so on-trend. Supported by the London Short Film Festival, January 14th  brought twelve films onto Rich Mix’s projection screen, using a cinematograph that was, I’m told, half vintage. The programme included archive LSFF material shot in 16mm and Super-8, in addition to modern digital films including Dogged, which was nominated for a BAFTA New Talent award in 2011.

The COLC’s music (much more confident and somewhat louder than the last Making Tracks I saw) transported us to a mental place where the films could eat away at our emotions. Films were set in Dubai (excerpt from Mirage by Srdjan Keca), a trainee Geisha’s boudoir (The Red House by Max Lincoln),  a cardboard house (Heron by Gary McQuiggin) and much more. The band turns their musical sensivity to the cultural semantics of each. Haunting Arabian melodies, abstract folk motifs, tense walls of guitar tremor and racing tabla, enhancing the character of the pictures on screen. When a little dialogue did occur on screen it felt out of place – arguing against the flow of the music.

Don’t think you can truly understand these films by watching them on youtube. With a live soundtrack you feel the vibrations, hear and see everything intensely, get a few shivers down your spine, and share your entrapment in the vision of the filmmaker with your fellow audience.

Of course, films shown with live soundtrack is not a new concept. For example, the Barbican recently staged ‘Underground’ with the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing a live score. I for one, want more.

Just because I liked it so much, here’s Heron by Gary McQuiggin:

Heron. from Gary McQuiggin on Vimeo.

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