Fridae

It is Hollywood, 1927. Talkies are just about to be invented, shaking the film industry and mass entertainment upside down. In an industry run by unions, the only people who will be out of jobs are the stars of silent films.

The Artist is a fictional story of George Valentin, a proud actor at his prime in a constellation of artists who, despite not uttering a single word in their films, manage to convey and evoke the entire range of human emotion while carrying the meaning of the film through their facial and body language, and through sheer charisma. Pitted against the rise of talkies, his star wanes just as a ingenue actress he personally discovers and fosters becomes a star in her own right.

Like so many of the silent films of the early 20th century, The Artist is a sensitive melodrama whose simple, even simplistic story serves as a backdrop for pure acting and well-crafted storytelling. To watch it is to turn back the clock, to be immersed in a mode of film where you don’t need dialogue if you have faces, to realise that what dialogue we expect in most modern film is largely extraneous.

Of course director Michel Hazanavicius takes sides here. He might as well since The Artist transcends the story it tells and becomes a tribute to an era of filmmaking that the world has passed by. Whether it's through re-creation or pastiche of old film sequences and special effects of that era, The Artist speaks eloquently and hypnotises us to feel the magic and joy of old-school filmmaking.

For myself, there have been just three films that manage to evoke the magic of making and watching movies: Ed Wood, Cinema Paradiso, and After Life. To these, I now add The Artist.