viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

H/T: Emily Friedman

The audience hears violins sawing tensely as they watch a man scream on screen; only, he is mute.  He moves his mouth, but we only learn his words through intertitles:  “I won’t talk!  I won’t say a word!!!”  So opens the 2011 Academy Award-winning film The Artist.  Medium and message here easily coordinate as The Artist uses the techniques of silent film to tell the story of protagonist George Valentin, who refuses to speak.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

But why won’t he talk?  David Haglund speculates that Valentin cannot act in talkies because his heavy French accent obscures his speech for American audiences; Marika Rose suggests that the film’s silence comments on changing gender roles.  Both of these answers point towards interesting concerns that The Artist pursues.  However, I’d like to think more about how The Artist privileges alternative forms of speech and how the film’s visual rhetorics comment on reality and representation.

Image Credit: The Northwest Trail

One obvious place where this comes into contention is the film’s return to portraits and images of George Valentin.  We see his face reflected back to us—and to him—on magazine covers, front pages, film screens, and even full-length portraits.  These images not only demonstrate Valentin’s popularity but show us a successful, charming, and talented artist.  But his fall becomes visible as his angry wife repeatedly defaces his pictures and movie patrons step on them as they lay discarded on a wet street.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The image stands in so completely for Valentin that speech is unnecessary.  As he later drunkenly stares at his shadow and castigates himself for being a “loser,” the shadow walks off, leaving George to destroy all of his films.  Saved by the young ingénue Peppy Miller, Valentin himself runs away when he discovers that Peppy has purchased and saved his dapper portrait.  When he walks up to a store window and stands in front of a tuxedo, seeing his face reflected above it, we see George alienated from himself.  He can confront his image and almost recognizes himself as he used to look, but is pulled out of the moment by a chatty cop.  His inability to recognize himself leads to the final climax where he attempts suicide, his burnt-out apartment mirroring his own despair, but the intertitle “BANG!” followed by the image of Peppy’s crashed car punctures the high drama.  It is this visualized noise that then opens up his other possibilities for speech.

In fact, The Artist relies not only on the expressive power of the silent image, but also the moving picture.  The Artist acts as a pastiche of silent film (specifically referencing its greatest star Rudolph Valentino) and the backstage musicals that comment on them.  Certain scenes and plots—like Peppy and George’s scene in A German Affair and Peppy’s rise to leading lady—mirror movies like A Star is Born and Singin' in the Rain.  Valentin’s slicked-back hair and overall physique resemble Gene Kelly’s, and The Artist underlines the similarity by making George Valentin a talented dancer whose comeback comes through a final showstopping number.  Dance is the language through which Valentin may fluently express himself—he uses it to entertain his audiences, to express his growing affections for Peppy, and to sell himself to Hollywood mogul Al Zimmer.  The language of dance, though, is clearly a heightened one, taking us outside of realism.  Along with George’s images, the lingering shots of dancing celebrate non-mimetic rhetorics.  Sound is too real in George’s nightmare; it threatens humiliation, alienation, and can deafen.  Art and artistic expression happen through the visual medium, and can move us beyond speech.  Peppy models the ideal viewer experience of Valentin’s film Tears of Love as she weeps over his slow sinking in quicksand.

Image Credit: The Fine Art Diner

While Peppy initially mocks “old actors mugging at the camera to be understood,” she here recognizes the power of melodrama.  The scene where Peppy goes into George's dressing room and pretends that he is his coat actually shows characters thinking in the movie clichés that The Artist itself adapts.  In fact, as Overthinking It further argues, the film does as well by embracing Jean Dujardin’s overexaggerated physical performance.   The website traces through Dujardin’s career as a parodist to show how he uses his “proportionally large face, with big, expressive features” and his “nimble physical energy” to be larger than life, to “perform in a style,” to “imitate other actors who have performed in that style, and “to comment, though his imitation, on what that style means.”

Image Credit: Theiapolis

In The Artist’s case, Dujardin comments on the very silent acting style he embraces and so well embodies.  By looking like Valentino and Kelly, he “look[s] backward, making a precursor of the present and commenting on what present movie stars are like by comparing them to a remanifestation of the past.”  I might here suggest that his comment is to point out how our present in fact shares similar anxieties with the 1920s and 1930s about realism and representation.  Websites like Pinterest and technologies like Photoshop allow for heightened self-representation, just as Peppy's film celebrity starts with a fake mole.  While our culture may we recognize that they’re not perfectly mimetic, it’s easy to accept the reality of these unreal representations.  In other words, when you live within media, it’s easy to forget the medium.  The Artist and Dujardin’s performance ask us to confront this.  By refusing traditional filmic speech and reverting to older styles, The Artist asks us to pay attention to these styles, these other forms of speech.  By embracing the obviously unreal, we can—like Valentin—learn to speak again, and even find pleasure within it.