Before We All Get Too Excited About The Artist…

Yes, I know. It’s really something, isn’t it? This time last year, did you expect a black-and-white and (mostly) silent movie to win Best Picture? No, of course you didn’t. For this reason alone, The Artist winning Best Picture is something to celebrate. It also helps that it’s a pretty good movie, too. Even for those of us who had some problems with the film, it’s hard to get caught up in the usual Best Picture backlash. It’s just so darned loveable.

But I can’t help but think that part of the reason why the Academy and the majority of critics have been showering so much praise on The Artist is the hope that if a lot of people see it and are charmed by it, they will seek out more silent movies and discover the joys of Lang, Murnau, Chaplin and Keaton. Yes, that would be fantastic. And maybe some people will do that. But unfortunately, I don’t think that The Artist will lead to a mass rediscovery of silent film by the movie-going public.

Part of that has to do with the fact that a Best Picture win might not be enough to convince people to see a silent movie. It is possible that the Weinstein machine can provide The Artist with a success similar to The King’s Speech from last year, but I think The Artist will probably end up looking more like The Hurt Locker and No Country for Old Men.

But even if The Artist draws a large post-Oscar audience, it still won’t convince people to seek out silent films. I know this because as charming as the movie was, one of the most dispiriting moments I have ever experienced in a movie theater occurred during this movie (spoilers ahead). Yes, The Artist is a silent movie for the most part. And for the most part, seeing a silent movie in a packed theater with an audience that was enjoying it was an exhilarating experience. And they were enjoying it. But like I said, The Artist is not an entirely silent film. There’s a nice dream sequence where George Valentin’s subconscious is seemingly taken over by a Foley crew that forgot to ADR his voice (why was this scene, a scene with sound, chosen by the Oscars to highlight Jean Dujardin’s silent performance?). But there’s also a moment at the end when George Valentin finally makes the transition to talkies and sound comes in for good. As we heard the characters speak for the first time, some people in the audience began to applaud, and my heart sank. To be fair, it wasn’t the entire audience applauding; it was probably about five people. But I think this audience reaction reflects a truth about The Artist and the people who have seen it.

The hardest part of getting people to watch classic movies is convincing them that there isn’t something missing when a movie is silent or in black and white, that these movies aren’t broken versions of “normal” movies, that in fact, being silent or in black and white (or both) can actually make a movie better. This is a little easier to do with black and white than it is with silents. Most people are already familiar with black and white from TV Land, music videos and sometimes modern mainstream cinema even if they’ve never seen a movie made before 1980.

It’s a little harder to convince people to watch silent movies. Now, it could be that I make this distinction because, while I was raised on black and white movies, I wasn’t raised on silents. But the more that I think about it, the more this seems like it might be a common experience, even among cinephiles. I think this is probably because black and white remained part of the entertainment experience for a long time after the introduction of color, while silent cinema disappeared fairly quickly after the transition to sound. Not only were a great number of movies still being made in black and white, television was almost exclusively in black and white for many years. Television was never silent. Children born in the Sixties were still accustomed to watching movies and TV in black and white. For them to show their favorite movies to their children (my generation), they would most likely have to show black and white movies at some point. I don’t recall ever complaining about watching a black and white movie as a child. I have no way of knowing if my experience is a common one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is.

My point is that while black and white was still considered to be a normal way of watching movies for a long time, silent cinema quickly became something abnormal, either the domain of academia or something that was too silly to be taken seriously as entertainment. This makes it even harder to convince a modern audience to watch silent movies.

Unfortunately, The Artist simply doesn’t do a very good job of convincing the audience that there isn’t something missing from the movie. Most of this is due to the fact that, despite what you may have heard, The Artist is not really a silent movie. It is a parody of silent movies. A loving parody to be sure, but it’s primarily concerned with gently spoofing the conventions of silent cinema rather than really trying to create a silent movie. To convince an audience that a silent movie is not missing something, the audience should not be aware that the movie is silent. With The Artist, the audience is constantly aware that it is watching a silent movie. Maybe it would be impossible to make the audience forget that the movie is silent, but The Artist doesn’t really make an attempt to do this. The most obvious example is the fact that the movie uses sound. The ending reveals to the audience that not only was the movie missing sound, but that the filmmakers have been withholding sound from the audience. Sound in The Artist essentially becomes the shark in Jaws, something that the audience wants to see (or, in this case, hear), but the director is keeping away from us.

But there are less obvious ways in which The Artist is telling the audience that sound is missing from the movie. Let’s take just about any dialogue scene in the film. Obviously, this story requires people to talk with each other, but the problem is that Michel Hazanavicius shoots his dialogue scenes as if he is shooting a sound movie. There is usually at least a minute of cutting between rather boring medium shots of two characters moving their mouths with no words coming out, intercut with title cards. The instinctive reaction of the audience is to notice that something is missing. Hazanavicius wants the audience to know that something is missing. He wants us to recognize that we are watching a silent film because, of course, the nature of parody requires that we know what is being parodied.

If Hazanavicius really wanted to pay homage to silent cinema, why not try to create a truly great silent film, one that convinces the audience that it is watching a movie and allows it to forget about the fact that the sound is gone? Silent filmmakers like F.W. Murnau knew that too many title cards would break the spell of the story, so they had to use visual ingenuity in order to tell stories with pictures. The best moments in The Artist come when it uses its visual strengths, and these usually come from the physicality of the performances.

But the greatest strength of silent cinema is in its ability to create an experience that is dreamlike and completely unreal. To do this, the filmmakers have to convince the audience that silence is a good thing. In Murnau’s Sunrise, what could the husband possibly say to his wife after he has tried to murder her? What words could make her love him again? Instead of words, Murnau gives us pure emotion that he creates entirely from images. As his camera glides behind the couple while they walk heedlessly through the traffic of a big city, we know all that we need to know. Words are unnecessary.

We can understand the greatness of silent cinema through silent masterpieces like Sunrise, but we can also look at the early talkies. If we look at Fritz Lang’s M, we’ll see a sound film that barely has any sound. Since Lang was a visionary silent film director, he knew the true power of silence and sound. There are extraordinarily suspenseful passages of silence in M, and when they are broken (most often by the murderer whistling The Hall of the Mountain King), the effect is chilling.

But what is perhaps more enlightening is to look at how, in many ways, early sound films were inferior to silent pictures. Take Victor Halperin’s 1932 film White Zombie. The movie is pretty lackluster, not to mention cringe-inducingly racist, and at 69 minutes, nearly interminable. Part of this may be due to the terrible condition of the picture on the DVD, but it’s mostly due to some truly bad performances. The exception is Bela Lugosi, who knew how to use his voice to create an unearthly and memorable character, just like he did in Tod Browning’s Dracula, which also surrounds him with normal characters whose performances have not aged well, particularly Dwight Frye whose fingernails-on-the-chalkboard performance nearly kills the wonderfully atmospheric first act of Browning’s film. Though White Zombie makes some occasionally good uses of sound, it mostly creaks along until a surprisingly lyrical and visually poetic silent climactic sequence. The movie immediately becomes better, more haunting, and more dreamlike without the sound. Several scenes in Browning’s Dracula work the same way (I love those long shots of mist rolling across the lawn of the mansion). As much as I would miss the sound of Lugosi’s voice, much of White Zombie (and probably Dracula, too) would work better as silent.

The highest function of combining black and white and silence is to make a movie much more unreal and dreamlike. Maybe this is why The Artist could only really function as a self-conscious silent movie. The story is too dependent on reality, too dependent on meetings and financial troubles to create the dreamlike effect that is the pinnacle of silent cinema. Instead of making an obviously silent film, why not pursue Murnau’s dream of making a silent film that can function without title cards? This is what is necessary to convince an audience that silent cinema is just as legitimate as sound. Otherwise, it’s just a strange kind of novelty, a funny way that people used to watch movies. A movie that gets people to look at silent cinema has to convince them that they will enjoy a silent movie just as much as they would enjoy one with sound. The audience that I saw The Artist with surely enjoyed the movie, but the ones who clapped toward the end were relieved that sound had returned. If you make a truly great silent movie, the audience shouldn’t miss sound at all. They should realize that if people come to the movies for dreams, then silent movies are the most dreamlike of all.

A Celebration of Cinema

Lists are kind of silly aren’t they? Particularly lists of movies, and most particularly, those that rank movies. I wish I could say that this was my reason for not really doing a Top 10 list this year, that I came to some epiphany about the pointlessness of making lists like that. No, the truth is that I was kind of lazy and kept pushing it back. And when I started thinking about it (after all, who’s rules would I be breaking to post a Top 10 list in February?), I realized how silly it would be to exclude a bunch of movies and hold up ten as THE BEST, especially when there are still so many films from last year that I haven’t seen yet. Instead of telling you what I think are the best films of 2011, why not just celebrate all that I loved about film last year, especially since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is doing the same thing tonight? To be fair, this will look very similar to a Top 10 list, but I think it’ll be less rigid, more relaxed. Whose rules do we have to follow anyway? Will I return to the usual format of the Top 10 list next year? Maybe. We’ll see how this goes. I might do this again next year, just, you know, earlier.

So, let’s get started with my favorite movies of 2011, in order:

Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life may have been one of the main reasons why I postponed making my list. I absolutely loved it when it came out last May, saw it three times in the theater, and it became my de facto favorite movie of the year. Yet in the months that I went without seeing it, I began to question my reaction to it? Was it really the soaring cinematic achievement that I thought it was, or had I just been going along with the standard critical opinion? I knew that I needed to see it again before declaring it to be the Best Film of the Year.

And after seeing it for a fourth time, it remains my favorite film of 2011. I am still in awe of Malick’s ambition, which is no less than to capture all of existence into one film. Yet, ambition alone is not sufficient to make a great film. The (in)famous sequence depicting the creation of the universe is not a random IMAX documentary dropped into the film. It is a glorious ballet of light, color, sound and music. The memories of 1950s Texas, which make up the bulk of the film are meandering and seemingly disconnected, but they are a fantastic evocation of childhood. It is ironic that a movie that spans the entire history of the universe could create such an incredibly distinct sense of time and place.

Yet, Malick’s focus also goes smaller and deeper. When a wounded dinosaur (yes, there are dinosaurs in this movie) struggles helplessly under the foot of a predator, Malick is asking: what is the value of life, something so frail that it can disappear in an instant? Watch the way that Malick’s camera (guided by the amazing cinematographer Emmanuel Lubeski; here’s hoping he finally gets his Oscar tonight) moves through a playground full of children, and you’ll see that Malick has his answer. We keep expecting that he’ll focus on one of our main characters, but he doesn’t. He just keeps moving through. Any one of these children would be worthy subjects of a movie. Malick’s camera often glances around at other people who wander in and out the frame. There is, after all, nothing all that special about the O’Brien family, but for Malick, they are worthy subjects of a film simply because they have lived. The events that happen to them are normal and happen to many people. The father tries to accomplish great things, but ultimately his greatest accomplishment is simply having a family. For Malick, that is enough. For Malick, every human, every plant, every dinosaur, every life is worth something. What a wonderful, joyous, life-affirming film this is.

Woody Allen is at the top of his form as a writer and a director with Midnight in Paris, an exhilarating delight of a movie. Yes, there is an element of (thankfully unexplained) magic in the film, but the magic is present in art, music and the joys of a great city. This is a film about seeking wonderful things, and not closing our minds to them, no matter what age they are from, whether they are living or dead. In a year filled with nostalgia in cinema, Allen finds the perfect way to deal with it. Maybe nostalgia is denial (as the pedantic professor says), but there are still many things to celebrate in the past. And of course, the movie itself is an absolute joy from start to finish, with a wonderfully crafted screenplay, expert direction and a pitch-perfect ending.

Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is one of the very best action pictures to come along in recent years. It depicts a group of (you guessed it) 13 assassins who are ordered to kill a feudal lord who is so sadistic, so narcissistically pleased with his evil nature that he makes other recent movie villains pale in comparison. The first half of the film is an intricately plotted set up for the heart-pounding, gloriously violent second half, when the 13 assassins take on the feudal lord and his 200 bodyguards. As pure spectacle and entertainment, it works majestically. But it’s also an intriguing study about the nature of authority and disobedience. On the one hand, this is an elegy for the samurai era, which is already coming to close with the approach of the Meiji Restoration. The samurai in this film gladly sacrifice their individual lives to protect society, but on the other hand, their mission is to disobey authority, to kill a lord who is dangerous to society precisely because he thinks that individuals below him must sacrifice themselves for his pleasure. The eternal tension between the individual and society, always present in the samurai film, is at the heart of 13 Assassins, not as an obvious message, but as a fascinating argument, an argument that is ultimately fought out with arrows and swords (and don’t forget the exploding bulls).

Criminally overlooked by the Oscars, The Interrupters is an extraordinarily powerful and moving documentary about former gang members in Chicago placing themselves into the line of fire to stop gang violence. The film takes place over the course of an entire year in which Chicago essentially becomes a war zone. Director Steve James uses interviews and harrowing footage to create a distinct sense of time and place. But though this is an emotionally devastating film about unspeakable tragedies, it’s not depressing. It’s about families being ripped apart, but also about communities coming together to heal themselves. Despite all of the tragedies, there is so much joy in this film. This is a film about life, not just death.

Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is a joy to behold, a movie filled with the magic and wonder of cinema. As a family picture, Hugo succeeds beautifully, telling the story of a young boy living in a Paris train station in the 1930s. Scorsese shows a surprising ability for physical comedy and harrowing adventure. His visual imagination knows no bounds, with a camera that glides around the train station with the same ease as Murnau’s camera in his silent films. Yet, this is also the story of an old man (I won’t say who he is, for those of you who haven’t seen the movie) who feels that he is past the prime of his life and has locked away the memories of his youth. In this way, Hugo bears a striking resemblance to Pixar’s Up, that other great recent children’s movie that isn’t really for children. Both films are about old men who, with the help of children, are able to reclaim the dreams of their youths. There is danger in this film, despair and tragedy, but there is also joy and wonder. I had an enormous smile on my face for the entirety of this movie.

Take Shelter looks and feels like a quiet, indie drama, but even at the beginning there is a growing dread in this film, and it slowly reveals itself to be an emotional and powerful tour de force. Michael Shannon should have received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a well-mannered, well-respected husband and father in the rural Midwest who begins to have visions of the apocalypse. Knowing that his family has a history of mental illness, he talks to counselors and tries to seek treatment. But just in case he isn’t crazy, he also begins preparing for a coming storm, to the growing alarm of his neighbors, his coworkers and his family. Shannon’s performance is a masterpiece of acting, and the scene when he finally explodes in public is a towering, heart-stopping storm unto itself. This is a film about a man driven to protect his family at all costs. He just doesn’t know if he has to protect them from the apocalypse or from himself.

One of the great cinematic sagas came to a close last year with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Perhaps inevitably, the conclusion has some difficulty standing on its own as a film, but the emotional power of the climax more than makes up for that. A great deal of that power comes from the fact that the film succeeds surprisingly well as a battle piece, rivaling such masterpieces as Zulu and Gettysburg. The preparations for the battle at Hogwarts are some of the finest of that variety in cinema, and the huge number of casualties creates a real sense of devastation and loss. In the three times that I’ve seen it, Harry’s last conversation with Hermione and Ron before he walks out to the forest never fails to put a lump in my throat. But most of the power comes from Alan Rickman’s brilliant performance as Snape (also worthy of an Oscar). The flashback scene when we learn the truth about Snape (so memorable in the book) is wonderfully rendered in the movie, perfectly capturing the longing that is so prevalent in this series. It’s all there in that brief moment when a little boy shows a little girl a little bit of magic on a hilltop: the innocence, the mystery, the wonder, the sadness, the joy and the longing of someone in the present looking back on the past.

With Meek’s Cutoff, director Kelly Reichardt delivers a fascinating, patient and absolutely engrossing Western about a wagon train lost in the wilderness. Shooting the film in the old Academy ratio (1.33:1) has the curious effect of opening up the canvas, showing how small these people and their problems are in the vast expanse of nature. The women on the wagon train are outsiders: their faces are hidden in shadow beneath their hoods, and they can barely overhear enough of the men’s conversations to know that they are lost. But a steely tough woman played by Michelle Williams begins to show her strength, and the way in which she takes control is quietly thrilling. Ultimately, the film comes down to one striking image of a wagon rolling out of control down a hillside. Just like the wagon, these people are completely at the mercy of gravity, the wind, and the ground beneath them. They may come to a crashing end, but maybe, just maybe, they can stay upright and keep moving.

Just like Hugo seemed like a strange choice for Martin Scorsese, so does A Dangerous Method seem like a strange choice for David Cronenberg. The story of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and a rivalry between them centered around Sabina Spielrein, this is essentially a movie about people sitting in rooms and talking. But it is an absolutely fascinating character study beautifully directed by Cronenberg. A great deal of credit goes to the screenplay by Christopher Hampton (based in part on his play), but watch the wonderful ways in which Cronenberg ever so subtly plays with the visuals. I particularly love his use of deep focus, and the way that he tries to keep two people in the same frame when they are talking, though it’s just as exciting when he decides to cut the other person out and push in for a closeup. Though the material is fascinating, the performances by Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen and Keira Knightley and the direction by Cronenberg make it thoroughly engrossing.

Melancholia, director Lars von Trier’s film about the end of the world, is an emotionally draining and curiously life-affirming cinematic experience. It’s a film about madness and despair, but there’s such a strange joy in the storytelling, certainly helped by the powerhouse performances from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsburg. Like Terence Malick, von Trier confronts enormous ideas on an incredibly personal and human level. In this film, the end of the world is not about last minute romances or panic in the streets. The end of the world is happening to these few characters alone. The greater part of the third act is so quiet and so lonely, but the very end is the exact opposite of quiet and lonely. It may have been the vibrations from the speaker system in the theater, but all I know is that the end of this film left me shaking.

The sign of a wonderful year for movies is the pain that comes when you have to eliminate movies from your list of favorites. So, here’s another top ten in alphabetical order:

City of Life and Death: A harrowing, unflinching chronicle of the Japanese occupation of Nanking, shot in beautiful black and white Cinemascope with strikingly disturbing and powerful images.

Give Up Tomorrow: A powerful, maddening and virtually unseen Filipino documentary about an infamous kidnapping and murder trial and a possible miscarriage of justice. The film paints an incredible portrait of two families on opposite sides of the case whose lives are devastated by a violent tragedy.

The Guard: John Michael McDonagh’s gloriously weird dark comedy with a wonderful performance by Brendan Gleeson as a cheerfully politically incorrect small town cop in Ireland.

Into the Abyss: Werner Herzog’s devastating documentary about the American capital punishment system. Herzog openly states his opinion on the death penalty, but he doesn’t judge any of his subjects or attempt to prove anyone’s innocence. He simply observes and listens to them, creating a piercing document of humanity.

Life, Above All: A wonderful, powerful movie about a girl in South Africa trying to keep her family together as it deals with tragedy. The threat of AIDS is barely whispered about, but its presence is always circling the events of the film. Khomotso Manyaka gives a spellbinding performance in the lead role.

Rango: A visually astonishing animated Western with dazzling images and exhilarating storytelling. Its Apocalypse Now-inspired chase scene through a canyon is one of the best action scenes in recent years.

Super 8: J. J. Abrams’ tribute to the golden age of Steven Spielberg films is a fantastic science-fiction adventure with a terrific group of young actors in the lead roles. Of course, the special effects and action scenes are dazzling, but the film is most exciting as a celebration of cinema and movie making.

Tabloid: Errol Morris’ documentary about 1970’s sex scandal in England is a fascinating look at an infamous media circus, but it’s also a wicked and hilarious study of human nature.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: A chilly and atmospheric adaptation of John le Carré’s classic Cold War spy thriller with a fantastic performance by Gary Oldman. Director Tomas Alfredson creates a distinct sense of a world that has been destroying these characters from the inside for longer than they can remember. Oldman’s recollection of a confrontation with his arch nemesis is a tour de force of acting, and the very last sequence of the film is one my favorite scenes of the year.

War Horse: A glorious epic from Steven Spielberg that follows two creatures, a horse and the boy who loves him from rural England to both sides of World War I. Spielberg fills the screen with masterful images throughout the film. The scene when the horse runs across No Man’s Land is pure cinematic poetry.

And even now, I still haven’t finished listing all of the movies that I enjoyed in 2011, so here are all the other pieces of cinema that brought me joy last year: The Adjustment Bureau, Amigo, The Artist, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, Captain America: The First Avenger, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the opening sequence of Drive, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Source Code, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, X-Men: First Class.

And as I mentioned earlier, there are still so many films that came out last year, that I still haven’t seen, which removes any attempt to claim that my list is at all definitive. Here are the films I wanted to see, but didn’t get a chance to: The Adventures of Tintin, Certified Copy, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, Contagion, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, 50/50, The Help, The Ides of March, J. Edgar, Louder Than a Bomb, The Mill and the Cross, Project Nim, A Separation, Shame, The Skin I Live In, The Swell Season, Terri, Tyrannosaur, Winter in Wartime.

I find it necessary to keep track of all the movies I’ve seen in a year, so the other day, I started making my list of movies seen in 2012. Most of the items on the list (there are about 5 titles so far) are movies I was catching up on from last year: The Artist, The Descendants, War Horse, etc. But I started to smile when I typed in the one new film I’ve seen so far this year: The Grey, a gloriously violent adventure film, easily the best of the recent Liam Neeson action vehicles. I smiled not just because I enjoyed the movie and the fact that my family refers to it as “Liam Neeson in Nice Doggie,” but also because I’m already looking forward to another year of cinema. As much as I enjoyed you 2011, it’s time to say farewell. This is what the Oscars should be about: waving goodbye to the movies of last year and celebrating them as we wave. Now tomorrow, after we’ve done our requisite grousing about who should have won and how the entire ceremony was completely illegitimate because The Interrupters wasn’t nominated for Best Documentary, it will be time to look ahead. After all, we’ve got The Hobbit to look forward to. And The Dark Knight Rises. And Prometheus. And new movies by Alfonso Cuarón and Wes Anderson. I’m getting excited already.