Fight The Future: "The Artist" (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)

“Cinema...appeases a certain sense of nostalgia that lies dormant in our hearts, nostalgia for countries never seen that will perhaps never be seen, but where it seems that we have already lived in a preceding life.” Fausto Martini, 1912


by James Hansen

In his book Eye of the Century, Francesco Casetti quotes Italian journalist Fausto Martini, who wrote the following in 1912: “Cinema...appeases a certain sense of nostalgia that lies dormant in our hearts, nostalgia for countries never seen that will perhaps never be seen, but where it seems that we have already lived in a preceding life.” Now, one hundred years later, cinema still presents us with this same does of nostalgia. From this, it could be argued that nostalgia itself is the cinematic (rather than merely photographic) condition. Without going too far into these issues – not to mention the significant changes brought on by a perhaps more contemporary condition in which irony and sincerity are a double-sided coin – it can be noted that many popular movies of 2011 provided heavy doses of nostalgia: The Help presented a dangerous nostalgia by overlooking its own preconditions; Hugo, the best and worst children’s movie about film preservation ever made, made a case for remembering histories and the enchantment of living within them; similarly, Midnight in Paris stumbled through its own enchantment with various time periods, ostensibly making a case for “the present,” as long as it involves a foreign country and beautiful companionship. The latter two films reflect Martini’s quotation – both Scorsese and Allen showcase the wonders of the past and suggest different alternatives for how those pasts cast be incorporated into the present. Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist further illustrates this nostalgiac tendency. However, unlike Scorsese or Allen, Hazanavicius offers little in the way of contemporary relevance. Rarely has a film ever been so autonomously nostalgiac; if ever there were a definition of nostalgia-for-nostalgia’s sake, The Artist is it.


Of course, this isn’t to say The Artist is without its pleasures. (And I imagine that some have no problem with the appeasing pleasantries of the nostalgia-for-nostalgia condition.) Starting in 1927, The Artist tells the story of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent film star at the peak of his powers. With a trusty canine sidekick by his side, George is, at all moments, a performer, sometimes to the ire of his castmates and producers. Soon, he runs into Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a cute, young girl with a sly smile. Before long, George’s producers are telling him about talkie pictures – the wave of the future! – to which George firmly resists. Almost overnight, old-timey George is released and the up-and-coming Peppy takes his place. (Have no fear: George has invested well enough to make a major motion picture completely independently and release it to theaters.)

Historical problems aside for the moment, Dujardin and Bejo are both very charming. Though several of the best scenes are drawn from other silents, they provides the scenes with a certain energy that isn’t built into the insipid screenplay. Dujardin won the award for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. He is in control of the film at every moment – and his period-based pantomime creates some genuinely smart and touching moments. Valentin’s nightmare sequence – in which interrupts his quietly controlled world – creates a visceral affect, signaling the true shock and radical change that sound brought to the center of movies.

At the same time, there is something missing at the heart of The Artist. Its final moments come off as cheap and easy. The much-discussed inclusion of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score indicates not only a complete disregard for the period detail which supposedly define the film, but also an amateur, lack of control by the director and editor refusing fairly simple, logical parameters in order to flash their cinematic playfulness. Why make this a silent film at all? Similarly, the cheap thrills and laughs of the Oscar-hopeful dog ultimately ring false and completely vapid – both in a literal Lassie rescue and in a dumbfounding use of intertitles toward the end of the film. Ultimately, a place is found for our hero (thanks to the beautiful woman who he brought into the biz): The Artist pivots on simple-minded history – if only silent stars weren’t so stubborn and put on dancing shoes! – that ignores its own subject matter.


Unquestionably, there is something in The Artist’s (or any) transitional focus which could echo the current state of filmgoing, even if it’s merely in striving to replicate a similar experience which is being lost. Perhaps people will see The Artist who have never seen a silent film before and it will draw them into the silent film world (although, given its slow, rollout, limited release strategy, one has to wonder about its effectiveness.) But, in the end, The Artist reads silent films as pleasant, but cheap – simple-minded sight gags for the world filled with sound. The tide has turned. Put on your dancing shoes, get a dog, and a beautiful girl, or be left behind. Its seeming cheerfulness ends with a menacing grin. In looking back in the manner of nostalgia-for-nostalgia’s sake, The Artist unwittingly sees itself as an outmoded commodity – one with a history, and one without a future.

Continue reading...

DVD of the Week: "Au Bonheur des Dames" (Julien Duviver, 1930)

by Chuck Williamson

In Au Bonheur des Dames (1930), director Julien Duviver relocates Emile Zola’s nineteenth-century bildungsroman into the age of mass consumption, automation, and modernization. Made at the end of the silent era, the film identifies the metropolitan space as the locus of both industrial and capitalist power and uses the novel’s department store romance in the employ of a bold visual reinterpretation that mixes social realism, conventional melodrama, and complex cinematographic strategies. In effect, Duviver’s film does not merely illustrate Zola’s novel, but reinvents it, enhancing the novel’s social and political vivisections of modern Paris through bold, virtuosic cinematic technique.

Duviver’s film follows Denise Baudu (Dita Parlo), an orphaned girl who moves to Paris to live with her uncle, a beleaguered fabric merchant whose business is threatened by a gargantuan luxury department store called Ladies’ Paradise, where Denise will later gain employment as a “live mannequin.” Eventually, Denise is caught in an ideological tug-of-war when an unexpected romance with ruthless storeowner Mouret (Pierre de Guingand) forces her to reconcile true love with the encroaching force of capitalist monopolization. But this slight, near-quotidian plot—a melodramatic, narratively-convenient love story punctuated by class conflict and contrivance—does not account for the film’s challenging, avant-garde aesthetic. In fact, the film works best when it widens this disconnect between story and discourse, as conventional bourgeois melodrama clashes with its fragmentary, enstranging modernist design. The opening sequence, for instance, portrays the metropolis as the site of psychic dislocation, as jittery, vertiginous cinematography, multilayered double-exposures, and elliptical editing reinvent Denise’s entry into the city as a harrowing subjective journey through both inner and outer spaces. With the unconventional fusion of modernist visual tactics and rote melodramatic narrative, the film’s aesthetic at times overpowers the wafer-thin plot, crafting visual representations of the sort of psychic dimensions denied by its surface narrative.

Even the controversial conclusion—which many critics have written off as a pro-capitalist cop-out—merely highlights the corrupting, coercive influence of both capitalist and patriarchal systems of power. Even as the machinery of melodrama attempts to disrupt such an interpretation, the ideological about-face made by its characters can be read as a representation of the ways various structures repress and dehumanize the subject through the removal of human agency. If anything, the crass monopolism and soppy, reductive romance featured in the conclusion seem like parts of a self-made prison, constructed through a pre-written script that is as artificial as the matte backdrop that enframes the lovers’ final reconciliation.

Continue reading...

DVD of the Week: Gaumont Treasures 1897-1913

by James Hansen

Allow me to nerd out this week with a DVD I haven't seen yet, but which is a must have for any early cinema lover. The Gaumont Treasures 1897-1913 box set has just about 600 minutes of silent films that most everyone hasn't even had the chance to see until this point. With notable films from early directors Alice Guy Blache, Louise Feuillade, and Leonce Perret, the release continues the ongoing critique and expanded understanding of all that was going on during the early days of cinema. This box, at least from the titles, looks a major addition to an always growing and always of interest period in cinematic history. Major kudos to Kino.

Continue reading...

DVD of the Week: "The Goddess" (Yonggang Wu, 1934)

by Chuck Williamson

Next month, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will kick off their fourteenth annual celebration of domestic and international cinema from the silent era. For those outside the silent cinema loop, the SFSFF is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving a long-neglected but vital part of our cinema history through archival screenings, educational panels, and promotional work—a true gift for silent cinema scholars and obsessives. In anticipation of this year’s festival — and also because I’m still bitter about not being able to go myself — I’ve decided to have a one-man movie marathon in my living room, going through some of the silent releases that would not be available without the SFSFF’s efforts.

The Goddess (Yonggang Wu, 1934) is one of those films. Since its initial SFSFF screening, The Goddess has given western viewers a rare glimpse into the burgeoning 1930s Chinese film industry, while also providing a perfect introduction to the filmography of screen legend Ruan Ling-yu. Throughout the twenties and thirties, Ruan earned international acclaim as China’s leading cinema icon, turning in a succession of natural, nuanced performances that ended with her tragic 1935 suicide. In The Goddess, her most famous role, Ruan plays an unnamed woman living in the decayed, desiccated Shanghai slums who is forced to moonlight as a prostitute in order to support her son. Despite its few flirtations with melodrama, the film remains a potent mix of the personal and the political, visualizing the consequences of the period’s troubled economic conditions through its pained narrative of maternal love and self-sacrifice. But The Goddess is perhaps best appreciated as an intimate and heartbreaking human drama enhanced by Ruan Ling-yu’s haunting presence—a subtle, affecting performance that externalizes the shame and sadness of her character without the use of language. If any film could serve as the perfect gateway into Chinese silent cinema, this would be it.

(Note: The DVD edition of this was produced by the SFSFF as a limited edition fund-raising item and can only be purchased through their website.)

Continue reading...

DVD of the Week: "Piccadilly" (E.A. Dupont, 1929)

by Chuck Williamson

One of Britain’s last silent films, Piccadilly visualizes the metropolitan space as pure modernist spectacle—a twisted knot of kinetic energy and abstract fragmentation—but also presents that same London milieu as a bisected heteropolis, a location defined by its impenetrable racial, cultural, and spatial boundaries. Mixing social realism with fluid formalism, Piccadilly weaves into its skeletal plot an examination of cross-cultural relations that belies its narrative simplicity. Set in the smoke-filled parlor rooms and jazz-clubs of London’s West End, the film establishes these spatial barriers almost immediately, crosscutting between the restrained, respectable, antiseptic dance-hall of the upper-classes and the cavernous, carnivalesque, near-decayed scullery—where Shosho (Anna May Wong), a sultry immigrant dishwasher, gives a wild, erotic dance performance. Eventually, Shosho catches the attention of the club impresario, Valentine (Jameson Thomas), and not only supplants dance diva Miss Mabel (Gilda Gray) as the club’s main attraction, but also the love interest of her benefactor. From here, the plot twists into backstage politics, sexual triangles, and—of course!—a unexpected murder.

Make no mistake—for most, the primary attraction of this film will be the luminous presence of Anna May Wong, who functions in the film as an alluring, sexually frank alternative to those cloistered Brits. But like Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box, Wong infuses into her performance a dash of mystery and ambiguity, transforming her potentially one-dimensional pleasure-seeker into an elusive and isolated figure who is both defined and destroyed by her desires. For Wong, a single sensuous gaze comes loaded with an infinite number of meanings, and the viewer cannot help but be mesmerized by her mere presence. It is a riveting, sumptuous performance that, under different circumstances, could have turned her into a cinematic icon.

Continue reading...

Overlooked DVD of the Week: "A Cottage On Dartmoor" (Anthony Asquith, 1929)

This is a darkly fascinating British silent film that appeared on DVD for the first time last year and has yet to receive the press and discussion it deserves, at least in the general public. Its restoration premiered at Cannes in 2005 and moved onto several other festivals, including the Telluride Film Festival where I was lucky to see it with live orchestration. I haven’t seen the film since then, but its unique images and sharp storytelling has stuck with me ever since. Director Anthony Asquith would go on to direct Pygmalion (1938) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), both available on DVD through Criterion, but neither of those good films approach the flare and brains shown in A Cottage On Dartmoor. Visually reflective of German Expressionism with a more classical narrative, A Cottage On Dartmoor came out near the end of “The Silent Era” and highlights many techniques that would become prominent in sound film. More than just an important film, A Cottage On Dartmoor is a remarkable silent thriller; it may be a recent rediscovery, but it is a must see.

Continue reading...

Forgotten VHS #8- Abel Gance's "Napoleon"

Not only is Abel Gance’s 1927 historical epic, Napoleon, a forgotten VHS – it may very well be the most unjustly forgotten film in the history of cinema. The hallucinatory masterpiece is the pinnacle of French Impressionism and is certainly Gance’s magnum opus. Using a dazzling array of inventive visual techniques, Napoleon anticipates the work of the cinematic surrealists and the American Avant-Garde of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, all while maintaining an involving and clear narrative.

Gance’s visual innovation in Napoleon is astonishing. The writer, director, and editor combines lightning fast editing (predating Brakhage by many years), beautifully orchestrated montage sequences (yep, better than Eisenstein), jarringly effective superimpositions (at one point there are 40 in a single shot), multiple aspect ratios (including 4:1, having three cameras shoot footage side-by-side with the intention of having the three film reels projected on three screens), split screens (by having discontinuous shots juxtaposed in the three screen format), and beautiful tinting (particularly during the film’s final scenes where the three screens are split and tinted to appear in the pattern of the French flag). In addition to these impressive aspects, the film features breathtaking camera work, including brilliant use of tracking shots, handheld shots, and once scene where the camera is attached to a swing and looms back and forth over a crowd.

Napoleon is an incredible film, but it is noticeably absent from the Sight & Sound polls and many canonical lists, even though it blows most films completely out of the water. Most appallingly, Gance’s genius film is absent in the DVD format. Hopefully, once the film is given a proper DVD treatment (please, Criterion, please!), it will be rediscovered and given its proper due. Currently, the film can be acquired on VHS for around $40 from Amazon Marketplace. It may seem pricey, but trust me, it’s worth it – unless you want to wait around for Turner Classic Movies to show it again.


by Brandon Colvin

Continue reading...