This year we chose The Artist: it had long been on my "must see" list and I was not in the least disappointed.
Here are my notes:
The
Artist
France 2011 100
minutes
Director: Michel
Hazanavicius
Starring: Berenice Bejo, Jean
Dujardin, John Goodman, Malcolm McDowell, Penelope Anne Miller
- Won
five Oscars including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Jean
Dujardin), Best Original Score and Best Costume Design.
- Nominated
for five more Oscars including Best Supporting Actress (Berenice Bejo) and
Best Original Screenplay (Michel Hazanavicius)
- A
further 109 wins (including Best Actor for Jean Dujardin at the Cannes
Film Festival) and 68 further nominations.
“The Artist is a formally daring and sublimely funny movie about the
end of silent movies in 1920s Hollywood.
It is itself silent and in black and white, with inter-titles and a
full, continuous orchestral score.
Endlessly inventive, packed with clever sight gags and rich in
stunningly achieved detail The Artist
is a pastiche and passionate love affair to the silent age; it takes the silent
movie seriously as a specific form, rather than as an obsolete technology, and
sets out to create a new movie within the genre.”
Peter
Bradshaw
In 1927 George
Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent movie star insists on casting Peppy
(Berenice Bejo), an unknown dancer, in his next film. Peppy becomes a huge star as talking pictures
arrive in Holly wood, but George continues to make silent films and his career
is ruined. Eventually Peppy comes to his
rescue and persuades the studio to allow her to make a musical with him.
Michel Hazanavicius
had wanted to make a silent film for many years as a tribute to his heroes of
the silent era, but he was only able to secure funding after the financial
success of two spoof spy films that he directed. He studied silent films to identify
techniques to make his screenplay comprehensible without using too many intertitles
and also calibrated lighting, lenses and camera moves to get the period look
right. The film was actually shot in
colour and then converted to black and white, with a slightly lower frame rate
than usual to mirror the slightly speeded up look of 1920s silent films.
The film received its
first screening at the Cannes Film Festival, initially out of competition but
then moved to the competition a week before the Festival opened. Subsequent to its success here the film won
many awards around the world and also appeared near the top of many critics’ lists
of the best films of 2011.
