The Artist

Although I have not seen The Artist, I have heard mixed reviews about the movie – actually, most of them were negative. I didn’t expect anything different from my peers: our generation is not known for our long attention spans, so a silent movie would probably appeal to very few. However, the nomination of this movie for an Academy Award, which it did in fact receive, inspired me to think more about the topic of silent movies. From an artistic standpoint, the audience loses so much by failing to embrace the silent movie: we rely too much on dialogue, and not on acting, and we are less motivated to focus on the beauty of the film because we are too caught up in listening to voices, to background music. Of course, this is only my opinion, and I am not at all suggesting that I wish that movies were still silent. Still, I do think there’s something a bit sad in the fact that contemporary films leave so little to the imagination.

I think it would be interesting to study how actors communicate in silent movies, and whether or not actresses are less communicative than actors, or even if they have less lines (I am thinking of the silent movies that are interspersed with words on plain black backgrounds). It would be interesting to see how one could interpret gender in silent movies, since the tone of voice is not heard: do you imagine the woman’s voice as soft and submissive, or sarcastic, or just silly? Is the man assertive or arrogant? And then there is the question of racial minorities, or children, or servants – do they have any lines at all? I think it would be very interesting to study silent movies and what they say about interpersonal relationships, and I am curious as to what a silent movie set in 2012 would look like.