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Right. So I’ve just watched The Artist. Um. 1600 words of babbled reaction below:
Firstly, it needs to be said. I loved it. I adored it, even. So, you know, I’m gonna ramble a bit.
It was a silent movie. Partially (more on that in a second). You have to understand, I was in this for the form. I wanted to see this because it was a silent movie, a modern silent movie, and I wanted to see what they’d do with that, how they’d cope.
And with the silent form, they coped very, very well. It’s not quite classically silent acting, on a lot of parts, but it’s effective silent acting. *grins* They got more or less the right frequency of title card use (maybe erring on the side of caution a little - the point where she runs out of the house yelling “CLIFTON!” probably didn’t need the card, for example), and actually showed a little of the variance possible with that in the movies-within-movies at the start. They had beautiful visual gags and symbolism throughout (him walking down the street in a shabby suit under a cinema awning proudly proclaiming “The Lonely Star”, for example).
The story, too, is actually fabulous. I wasn’t coming into this expecting content (again, just not my focus point), but … That’s where the real strength of the movie lies. The use of the form and the content to explore each other. (Yes, it’s an extraordinarily meta movie, and yes, that would often annoy me, but no, this time it didn’t, and yes, that is possibly because I’m biased, but no, I don’t particularly care. *grins* How’s that for a run-on sentance?)
The characters honestly did feel real. It wasn’t the cartoonish buffoonery you often get with parodies of silent film. It wasn’t all melodrama (and it wasn’t a romantic comedy, though it had a lot of the cliches). There were so many moments of quiet viciousness in it. When she gives an interview on talkies and ‘making way for the new’, and he quietly stands up out of his chair at the table behind her, gives her a little bow, and says “I’ve made way for you”. When his wife leaves him (not because there was another woman, but because he’s been slowly sinking into bankruptcy, alcoholism and obsession, all while ignoring her at best, and she can’t bear it anymore), she leaves him a note, on the back of a defaced picture of him in his heyday, telling him he has two days to collect his ‘souvenirs’ and leave, and under it, in a postscript, telling him he should go watch the movie that competed with his last-ditch effort and killed it dead, because it was ‘incredible’. I mean, wow.
And his sinking into despair … Yes, it’s a story that’s been told before. But damn was it acted well. You wanted to hit him so much, but you wanted to help him too. There’s a moment, when he’s watching the reels of his old films, and shuts it off, and stands, and you know what he’s going to do, you know it, and you are desperately, desperately hoping he doesn’t.
The story isn’t a romantic comedy, or even really a romance. It’s about … Pride, and fear, and being too stubborn to change, and the despair when it costs you everything, and the gut-wrenchingly difficult decision to try and stand again. It’s about the people who did make the change, and how they have to deal with flying in the face of everything the people they respect believed in, but doing it anyway because it is the future, and they are good at it, and dammit, they’re not going to be ashamed of that. It’s about learning to accept that you can’t do the things you used to anymore, that you can’t support yourself or anyone else that way anymore (Clifton, I love you), that sometimes, maybe, you have to accept help to try something new.
And that is where it comes back to form. That’s where it comes back to the meta, and what they did in the movie in having form and content support each other. The story is about the shift from silent movies to talkies, and the consequences and struggles of those caught in the change. And the form …
There are two points in the movie where silent gives way to sound. The first, it’s just a taste, at the start of his decline, when he’s rejected talkies for the first time, and is horrified by them. Just some clanks on his makeup table that are audible to the audience, and his horrified reaction to them.
Watching it, I hated that moment. Having gotten caught up in the movie so far, and having come for a silent movie, I hated that moment. I was all: “I came for a silent movie, damn well give me one, you bastards, don’t you do your clever little switches on me now! I didn’t come to this damn thing for sound, I can get that in any goddamn movie these days!”
And then it went back to silent, it went immediately back to silent, and I was all relieved and residually annoyed, and then getting caught back up in the movie and the story.
And the story I’m getting caught up in is his slow, desperate, ugly slide into despair. As he loses more and more, as his pride gets stomped on more and more, as you start to spend more of the movie wanting to scream at him, “It’s not worth it, you moron, stop living in the past, oh fuck, no, don’t do what I think you’re going to do, fire is a horrible way to die, fuck, she just offered to help you, yes, she’s a creepy stalker lady, but she can get you back in, you can have hope, money, dignity, she’s not doing it to have you owe her, fuck, put the fucking gun away …”
And she gets him in around, she lets him stand on his own dignity, she offers him a way that lets him honestly keep his pride, because he gave her a start, and she’ll give him a new one, and yes, it’s in talkies, but it’s also building from the things he did before, the things he was introduced doing and enjoying and sharing gleefully with her, and it works, and then the last moment of the movie, the last scene, there is sound again, there’s a build through percussive sounds to breathing to his voice, and you honestly want to hear it, you want to hear him accept this, be able to do this, and then …
And then you realise what they just did. That they just brought the audience, through a combination of form and content, through the shift from silent to talkies. Made the audience feel the initial rejection, the despair, the hope, and the eventual acceptance.
If you’re there for the silent movie, the first time it switches to sound, you reject it. You don’t want it. And then, by the end of the movie … you do, because it means something different now. It’s an evolution, not a corruption, of the form. It’s his saving grace, and god, by the end of this movie, do you ever want him to have one.
It’s a celebration of both the silent era, and the traumatic shift through to talkies, and then the talkie form itself. It is, as advertised, a love letter to film, people, progression and form. It is incredibly sympathetic, not only to both forms, but to the people on both sides of the shift. It’s his story, but we never hate her, for being successful where he starts to fail, for being adaptable where he can’t change, doesn’t want to. We don’t hate her for having taken the start he gave her and run with it, we don’t hate the new for taking over from the old. Because they’re never demonised. Hell, not even his wife is demonised. There are moments of viciousness, but you know where they’re coming from, and most of the time you can’t blame the parties involved. They’re doing their best, in a world that’s changing on them.
So, yes. I unabashedly love it. I love the form, I came to it for the form, but the film itself is more than that. It’s more than a modern silent movie. It’s a marriage of form and function to tell the story of the ending of an era, a paradigm shift in an industry it loves, and the people who struggled through it.
And, for a bonus, it is also a modern silent movie, that does the form right. *grins*
I love it. Honestly and straight up. And I don’t even care. *smiles tiredly* This is the kind of meta that I like. Not something that’s trying to be clever for clever’s sake, but something that is trying to reveal and explore something they love, through as clever a means as is at their disposal. The love for movies, for the people and the industry, horrible and unsympathetic as it often is (and boy, do they ever show that one), is clear all the way through, and I can’t help but love that.
I recommend this, in short. *grins sheepishly* Boy, do I ever recommend it. This one is getting bought.
It was a silent movie. Partially (more on that in a second). You have to understand, I was in this for the form. I wanted to see this because it was a silent movie, a modern silent movie, and I wanted to see what they’d do with that, how they’d cope.
And with the silent form, they coped very, very well. It’s not quite classically silent acting, on a lot of parts, but it’s effective silent acting. *grins* They got more or less the right frequency of title card use (maybe erring on the side of caution a little - the point where she runs out of the house yelling “CLIFTON!” probably didn’t need the card, for example), and actually showed a little of the variance possible with that in the movies-within-movies at the start. They had beautiful visual gags and symbolism throughout (him walking down the street in a shabby suit under a cinema awning proudly proclaiming “The Lonely Star”, for example).
The story, too, is actually fabulous. I wasn’t coming into this expecting content (again, just not my focus point), but … That’s where the real strength of the movie lies. The use of the form and the content to explore each other. (Yes, it’s an extraordinarily meta movie, and yes, that would often annoy me, but no, this time it didn’t, and yes, that is possibly because I’m biased, but no, I don’t particularly care. *grins* How’s that for a run-on sentance?)
The characters honestly did feel real. It wasn’t the cartoonish buffoonery you often get with parodies of silent film. It wasn’t all melodrama (and it wasn’t a romantic comedy, though it had a lot of the cliches). There were so many moments of quiet viciousness in it. When she gives an interview on talkies and ‘making way for the new’, and he quietly stands up out of his chair at the table behind her, gives her a little bow, and says “I’ve made way for you”. When his wife leaves him (not because there was another woman, but because he’s been slowly sinking into bankruptcy, alcoholism and obsession, all while ignoring her at best, and she can’t bear it anymore), she leaves him a note, on the back of a defaced picture of him in his heyday, telling him he has two days to collect his ‘souvenirs’ and leave, and under it, in a postscript, telling him he should go watch the movie that competed with his last-ditch effort and killed it dead, because it was ‘incredible’. I mean, wow.
And his sinking into despair … Yes, it’s a story that’s been told before. But damn was it acted well. You wanted to hit him so much, but you wanted to help him too. There’s a moment, when he’s watching the reels of his old films, and shuts it off, and stands, and you know what he’s going to do, you know it, and you are desperately, desperately hoping he doesn’t.
The story isn’t a romantic comedy, or even really a romance. It’s about … Pride, and fear, and being too stubborn to change, and the despair when it costs you everything, and the gut-wrenchingly difficult decision to try and stand again. It’s about the people who did make the change, and how they have to deal with flying in the face of everything the people they respect believed in, but doing it anyway because it is the future, and they are good at it, and dammit, they’re not going to be ashamed of that. It’s about learning to accept that you can’t do the things you used to anymore, that you can’t support yourself or anyone else that way anymore (Clifton, I love you), that sometimes, maybe, you have to accept help to try something new.
And that is where it comes back to form. That’s where it comes back to the meta, and what they did in the movie in having form and content support each other. The story is about the shift from silent movies to talkies, and the consequences and struggles of those caught in the change. And the form …
There are two points in the movie where silent gives way to sound. The first, it’s just a taste, at the start of his decline, when he’s rejected talkies for the first time, and is horrified by them. Just some clanks on his makeup table that are audible to the audience, and his horrified reaction to them.
Watching it, I hated that moment. Having gotten caught up in the movie so far, and having come for a silent movie, I hated that moment. I was all: “I came for a silent movie, damn well give me one, you bastards, don’t you do your clever little switches on me now! I didn’t come to this damn thing for sound, I can get that in any goddamn movie these days!”
And then it went back to silent, it went immediately back to silent, and I was all relieved and residually annoyed, and then getting caught back up in the movie and the story.
And the story I’m getting caught up in is his slow, desperate, ugly slide into despair. As he loses more and more, as his pride gets stomped on more and more, as you start to spend more of the movie wanting to scream at him, “It’s not worth it, you moron, stop living in the past, oh fuck, no, don’t do what I think you’re going to do, fire is a horrible way to die, fuck, she just offered to help you, yes, she’s a creepy stalker lady, but she can get you back in, you can have hope, money, dignity, she’s not doing it to have you owe her, fuck, put the fucking gun away …”
And she gets him in around, she lets him stand on his own dignity, she offers him a way that lets him honestly keep his pride, because he gave her a start, and she’ll give him a new one, and yes, it’s in talkies, but it’s also building from the things he did before, the things he was introduced doing and enjoying and sharing gleefully with her, and it works, and then the last moment of the movie, the last scene, there is sound again, there’s a build through percussive sounds to breathing to his voice, and you honestly want to hear it, you want to hear him accept this, be able to do this, and then …
And then you realise what they just did. That they just brought the audience, through a combination of form and content, through the shift from silent to talkies. Made the audience feel the initial rejection, the despair, the hope, and the eventual acceptance.
If you’re there for the silent movie, the first time it switches to sound, you reject it. You don’t want it. And then, by the end of the movie … you do, because it means something different now. It’s an evolution, not a corruption, of the form. It’s his saving grace, and god, by the end of this movie, do you ever want him to have one.
It’s a celebration of both the silent era, and the traumatic shift through to talkies, and then the talkie form itself. It is, as advertised, a love letter to film, people, progression and form. It is incredibly sympathetic, not only to both forms, but to the people on both sides of the shift. It’s his story, but we never hate her, for being successful where he starts to fail, for being adaptable where he can’t change, doesn’t want to. We don’t hate her for having taken the start he gave her and run with it, we don’t hate the new for taking over from the old. Because they’re never demonised. Hell, not even his wife is demonised. There are moments of viciousness, but you know where they’re coming from, and most of the time you can’t blame the parties involved. They’re doing their best, in a world that’s changing on them.
So, yes. I unabashedly love it. I love the form, I came to it for the form, but the film itself is more than that. It’s more than a modern silent movie. It’s a marriage of form and function to tell the story of the ending of an era, a paradigm shift in an industry it loves, and the people who struggled through it.
And, for a bonus, it is also a modern silent movie, that does the form right. *grins*
I love it. Honestly and straight up. And I don’t even care. *smiles tiredly* This is the kind of meta that I like. Not something that’s trying to be clever for clever’s sake, but something that is trying to reveal and explore something they love, through as clever a means as is at their disposal. The love for movies, for the people and the industry, horrible and unsympathetic as it often is (and boy, do they ever show that one), is clear all the way through, and I can’t help but love that.
I recommend this, in short. *grins sheepishly* Boy, do I ever recommend it. This one is getting bought.
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