Directing Silent Drama - Researching "The Artist"
Although it is my ambition to create a silent drama for our major project, in the past I have stayed away from the classic 1920's silent films, except the odd bit of Charlie Chaplain. I don't really have an excuse, but I always felt a little put off by the on screen text, and over dramatisation, I feel you could tell a silent story, well, without the need for this. I was wrong of course. You can on a small scale, through a montage like the one I am finding myself constantly talking about in UP, but for a feature length narrative, that is some feat!
I'd been putting off watching The Artist now for a long time. Again no real excuse, I just felt I needed to watch it because I was a film student and it's a film that seems to be hot on everyone's lips, so it was a kind of "Should do" rather than "Want to". I really didn't think it would be my cup of tea, and that I would find enjoyment in it, apart from admiring the style. Last night I bite the bullet ......... WOW!
The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, was released in 2011. A french film, shot mainly in hollywood, The Artist is a love note to the golden ages of cinema. Staring Jean Dujardin and Derenice Bejo, the film focuses on the relationship of an older silent film star and a rising young actress as silent cinema falls out of fashion and is replaced by talkies.
The Artist was a pure delight. I really did not expect to be throughly mesmerized, uplifted and unashamedly joyful. Even my partner, who I always force to watch films with me that I know he probably won't enjoy, sat there grinning the whole way through!
I think the main reason it had this effect on me, is because it really showcased the magic of cinema, the theatrical and entertaining majestic art form, from when it was first born! Presently I find myself watching plenty of cinema that is raw, realistic, edgy and sometimes downright depressing.
Of course that has it's place, but as soon as you sit down to watch The Artist, you know it isn't real, it's over the top, funny, heartwarming, cheesey make believe.......
but God does it make you switch off from the crap in your life!
It really was escapism for me, so if I haven't sold it to you yet, JUST GO WATCH IT. I promise you will be surprised! And yes before anyone says its a simple melodrama, stop being melodramatic about, I really couldn't care :)
Of course not only was this a nice rest bite for a couple of hours, it taught me a lot about making a silent drama. Not that ours will be a homage to the 1920's kind, but the principles are the same, this is what I took from it:
Silent Dramas;
- Are image driven
- Melodramas do work best
- Like The Artist, you can shoot in colour and then change it to black and white afterwards.
- For an authentic look, shoot at 22fps, this will give the slightly sped up look of the 1920's
- Sleek lighting is a must, the lighting really does replace the dialogue in many ways to tell the story.
- Plenty of dramatic close ups, don't be afraid to really show someone's teeth!
- Finally and most importantly, meticulously developed informational visual cues! It's the only way it can work!!
I also found an interesting interview about directing Silent Films in the modern day, from the director of The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius:
What is it about the silent form that resonates in 2011?
The format allows you so many things. The way it works, how the audience participates in the storytelling process, you put your own imagination in the movie. For every single person, that makes the movie very intimate, because there's so much of yourself [in it]. It's a great experience. It's a very different experience. It's a sensual experience.
How does the silent form ask more of the audience?
The less you do, the more the audience does. I'll give you an example, which is really one of the first lessons of cinema you can have. In M, the Fritz Lang movie, you see the [killer], he grabs a young girl in the city, and he goes with her into a kind of garden. The young girl drops a balloon and the camera follows the balloon. You don't see any kind of violence. We just follow the balloon.
"The fact is, it's so unrealistic to show people that talk and you can't hear them. You don't ape reality, you create a show that is a show and knows it's a show."
If you ask people after the screening, "What did he do to the young girl," everyone will say what [seems] worst [to] himself. … Because everyone does the job [of filling in the blanks].
What effect does that sort of abstraction have on the overall experience?
[Audiences] know real life is not black and white. So they recreate the color. They recreate the sound of the city, for example, the sound of the cars. Nothing is false, because you do it. You do it not very precisely. You just imagine it and you accept it. So you put so much of yourself [that] at the end of the movie, the movie is yours for real.
You stick to the characters. You stick to the story. I think you're much more involved in the storytelling process. It looks like it's very intellectual and you have to do a lot of work, but it's not. You do it very naturally. You have to remember that these movies were made for people much less educated than we are. For common people, it was a very popular medium.
Did your directorial approach differ here?
The point that's radically different is how you conceive of things, because you have to tell the story with images. And you have to create the images that tell the story, and you have to make things easy for all the people. For the actors, for example, you can't ask them to mime things. They have to be natural. That's what they do. You can't ask them to ape the code of acting of the '20s. So you have to write the images that will tell the story using the actors in normal situations.
The most challenging part for me was the writing process, because I had to be sure that I was able to tell the story. In a way, you have a lot of limitations because you don't have access to too much complex story, because you don't have dialogue. In another way it's very freeing, because it allows you to use imagination that usually you don't use and you wouldn't dare use. The fact is, it's so unrealistic, to show people that talk and you can't hear them [and] they're in black and white. You don't ape reality, you create a show that is a show and knows it's a show.
How do you successfully tell such an earnest story without irony or condescension?
To me, it was very difficult, because the movies I'd done before, the OSS [films] were very ironic and very sarcastic. For this one, the strength of the format is actually to allow you to do nice things. It works with that format. It can work.
But if you put irony in it, you kill everything, you ruin everything. I tried not to be ironic, and to respect the characters and respect the story. I want it to be entertaining and funny, but I tried to be funny without irony. Looking at the good silent movies that I watched, the ones who aged the best were the melodramas and the romances, so that's what I wanted to do.
What about working the comedy into the mix?
I put some entertaining and funny things in it because that's my way to be polite. [If] I ask people to come and see a black-and-white, silent, French movie, I can try to entertain them a little bit.
Have you thought at all about how amazing it is that directing a silent movie in 2011 has made you an Oscar frontrunner?
When you're a director, the Oscar is something that you don't even dream of. I could say that I'm honored to be part of the discussion, but I think I would be [minimizing] the reality. It's not even that. It's more than surprising, [especially] when you're not American, which is my case. I'm not union. I don't live here.
I really tried to make an American movie, [in that] the story is very American. I tried to find a sense of the American spirit, really. It's unbelievable, actually. That doesn't exist, a foreign director doing a foreign movie going to the Oscars. It's Mr. Smith Goes to the Oscars.
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