You gave this five Academy Awards and seven BAFTAs in 2012 ? !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Christmas Day

A film, Michel Hazanavicius, where you do not hear the dialogue is only incidentally, not truly, a silent film : The Artist (2011).
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 26, 2013

It never felt like a silent film, except (as Hitchcock might) drawing attention - in a patent dream-sequence or a waking nightmare of mouths - to sound or its absence. Otherwise, largely uninterestingly shot, and with an effect of black and white that drifted in and out of sepia all the time, it was paper thin in trying to locate a plot in the five years from 1927 on.

This is essentially a palpably hollow rags-to-riches story and vice versa intermingled, and coupled with some inadequately explained fascination of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) for George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and, on some level, of his for her. Pride, grand gestures better made in Sunset Boulevard (1950), and a descent into the abyss portrayed there far more effectively conclude the armoury of Hazanavicius' screenplay and direction.

If, as some want to say (as they want to say about what I find the wasteland of Holy Motors (2012), rather than a witty, comprehensive library of reference), this film is a tribute to what some call 'the silent era', this very paucity of living material actually insults the memory of those who worked at that time : compare, say, the richness of meaning in Anthony Asquith's Underground (1928) with the ridiculous scene where Valentin has to pull off every dust-sheet to realize that he has been living on charity, with tempestuously Herrmannesque scoring, which maybe makes using the 'Love Scene' music from his score for Vertigo (1958) seem almost inevitable, but never right :

Now having watched The Artist (2011), which was carefully avoided at the time, @THEAGENTAPSLEY agrees with Kim Novak: http://t.co/n2aiA5YUDn
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013

Maybe there is more to say, but not now...


These reviews, via www.rottentomatoes.com, make for interesting reading :

Jeffrey Overstreet, Filmwell

Ron Gonsalves, eFilmCritic.com



Thirty months on, a postlude :

Watched the first ep of #StrangerThings. Didn't think that much to it. Think I'd rather watch actual 80s movies.

— Ryd Cook (@RydCook) August 1, 2016

An equivalent truth may hold for The Artist (2011) [and the theme from Vertigo (1958)], @RydCook ? ;) https://t.co/9wAtIe46KO

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 1, 2016

Not really sure that that is so, @RydCook : reading about Mary Pickford at that time made far more of a valid impression on me ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 1, 2016

@THEAGENTAPSLEY I liked The Artist. It's in the style of a silent movie while at the same time also being about the story of silent to sound

— Ryd Cook (@RydCook) August 1, 2016

It *was promoted* as both of those things :

The Artist (2011) is without audible speech, but is not a silent film ? https://t.co/InDZpVk8D4

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 2, 2016

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Vertiginous Hitch

This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 September

This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)

* Contains spoilers *

When the Jimmy Stewart / Alfred Hitchcock collaborations that had been quickly taken out of circulation were released again in the mid-1980s, I went to see two or three, certainly Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). I remember not being much struck by either, the former because I found its device - as it assuredly is meant to be - so limiting, the latter because I just did not get it, and the suddenness with which some films from that era ended, with the words 'THE END' and the studio logo coming up, did not help.

Yesterday, watching Vertigo for the first time since then, I found myself coming at it with the eye of someone who loved Chinatown (1974), and found much that links the two, including a way of viewing that had me questioning who was the client and what had Stewart John 'Scottie' Ferguson been engaged to do and why. The key scene, for this way of thinking, was not at Gavin Elster's office, but the next one, at Ernie's, and questioning for whose benefit it was that Scottie was there, in terms of who was identifying whom.

Thereafter, having postulated that Scottie was the one to be seen by Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), it was easy enough to see him being led a dance, even to the extent of her, more than once, taking a parking-space that left him pulling in where no space existed. When she threw herself into San Francisco Bay, she then did so knowing that Scottie was there. (How all this connects with the foundation novel, D'Entre les Morts, I do not know, but research may tell me without having to look it out.)

In the meantime, it is the way of thinking that relates to Chinatown that interests me. Both films have secrets, a crime, someone pretending to be someone else and in whom a third someone should not fall in love, and all end with the death of that someone. In Vertigo, the private investigator (or PI) as a means to an end not known to him is hardly new*, but we are immersed in his pursuit such that we can be blinded to the fact that he has been blinded and bought a story.


To be continued


End-notes

* In a way it goes all the way at least back to Jonah, with texts such as Sir Gawain, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and G. K. Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday in between.


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