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Saibal Chatterjee finds that Michel Hazanivicius’ black-and-white silent film The Artist, which got much critical acclaim recently, isn’t the only one of its kind currently doing the rounds
The stunning Oscar sweep by French film, The Artist, has taken movie fans the world over by surprise. Who could have imagined that a $12-million fiction film sans sound and conventional dialogue would end up garnering unstinted critical accolades in addition to making pots of money at the boxoffice? Will the success of The Artist, Michel Hazanivicius’ lively tribute to Hollywood’s eventful silent era, trigger a wave of similar films? No. However, the much-applauded film isn’t the only one of its kind currently doing the rounds. Top flight Hollywood director Tim Burton is making the black-and-white Frankenweenie, scheduled for worldwide release in October this year. Like The Artist, it harks back to Hollywood’s glory days and pays homage to the 1931 film, Frankenstein.
Indie filmmaker Vlad Kozlov is giving finishing touches to Silent Life. The debutant director plays Rudolph Valentino, moviedom’s first major sex symbol. Set in 1926, the film blends elements of the past and present and uses both colour and black-and-white raw stock to piece together the story of the final year of the silent era Hollywood icon’s life. Besides Kozlov, the cast of Silent Life, which is an expanded version of the director’s silent, black-and-white short film Daydreams of Rudolph Valentino, features Isabella Rossellini and Galina Jovovich, Milla Jovovich’s mother.
In 2010, American musician and philanthropist Dan Pritzker made Louis, a fictionalised account of the early life of jazz great Louis Armstrong. Set in New Orleans of 1907, the film employs the ingredients of classic silent era drama — a boy with a pocketful of dreams, a damsel in distress and a menacing villain. Shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, Louis is a 70-minute with live music composed and arranged by Wynton Marsalis and performed by him and other musicians, pretty much way it used to be in the 1920s.
In 1999, Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki made the critically acclaimed Juha, based on a 1911 novel authored by Juhani Aho. While the original story about a farmer’s wife who is seduced by a city slicker is set in the 18th century, Kaurismaki located his film in the 1970s. In 1994, Tim Burton himself made Ed Wood, a largely true story about Edward D. Wood, who is widely regarded as the worst filmmaker the world has ever known. Johnny Depp played the protagonist with Martin Landau essaying the role of Bela Lugosi, cinema’s first Count Dracula. Hungarian master Bela
Tarr makes only black-and-white films. In 1994, he directed Satantango,
a seven-and-a-half-hour seminal masterpiece, and followed that up with
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), The Man from London
(2007) and The Turin Horse (2011).
Dutch-born Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer made Dr Plonk in 2007 pretty much in the style of a Buster Keaton silent comedy. It tells the story of a scientist who, in 1907, warns that the world would come to an end unless something is done to prevent the catastrophe. Celebrated Austrian director Michael Haneke won the Palme d’Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for the masterly black-and-white The White Ribbon. The film homes in on a tiny Protestant village in northern Germany just before the outbreak of World War I. In 2008, Filipino maverick Lav Diaz crafted the eight-hour-long magnum opus Melancholia, a meditative exploration of the persistence of sorrow. The film won a prize at the Venice Film Festival and confirmed Diaz’s position as one of the world’s most unconventional filmmakers. Clearly, The Artist isn’t alone out there. For many, silence is golden and black-and-white has a sparkle of its own.
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Produced by Disney, Frankenweenie
is a 3D stop-motion animated feature that builds upon Burton’s 1984
short film of the same name. A boy’s much-loved dog Sparky dies. He
uses the power of science to bring the pet back to life. Much as the
boy tries to keep Sparky on leash, the canine runs loose and causes
havoc in town.
The Artist
revels in comedy; Silent Life is tinged with tragedy. Valentino
is on a tour to promote his last film, Son of the Sheik, when he
suddenly collapses and is hospitalised. He undergoes surgery but loses
his grip on reality. The comatose heartthrob of millions sees the many
emotional reverses of his life flash before him.
A strong streak of
creative experimentation is a constant in all such cinematic
endeavours. It is no surprise, therefore, that almost all major
black-and-white films made in the past two decades have been helmed by
directors, who work outside the mainstream.
