Jonathan Romney writes for The Independent about the up-and-coming Oscar-contender The Artist: "The Artist raises the ghosts of Tinseltown to uncanny effect, but also with a sincerity that's utterly disarming. Executed with rapturous fondness for the period, it's far more than a conceptual film-buff project – although Hazanavicius can wax theoretical about it. 'The directors of the 1920s weren't making silent films – they were just making films. So I had to be aware of the fact that I was addressing people who knew I was making a silent film – and that they knew I knew I was making a silent film.'"
I watched Martin Scorsese’s Hugo last week and, in the same way as The Artist, there is a huge fondness for the love of the Silent Era. It seems that we may be in a time whereby a nostalgic look on the History of Cinema is littering our cinema screens. Whether it be the latest Pedro Almodovar or Quentin Tarantino, whereby they self-reference film-genre relentlessly (the former claiming that The Skin I Live In was considered briefly to become a silent movie, whilst within Talk To Her, Almodovar created a nostalgic-silent movie to depict a rape scene) or My Week with Marilyn glorifying the 50's productions and iconic status of the film stars, decades before the 'celebrity culture' that we currently live in.
I commented last week on the change 'digital cinema' is having on the film industry. If a Silent, French Film wins the Best Picture Oscar for 2011, this clearly shows that maybe the industry is not as cynical as we think. And that clearly, to paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park - "Art will find a way..."
Simon Columb
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