Member review

Before watching the artist, I was not overly thrilled on the show due to my personal taste in film. I enjoy historical films but only modern made ones in colour. Upon seeing the trailer in black and white with the classic music, I wasn’t looking forward to viewing the film. About 20 minutes in I started to start engaging with the film as it was not what I was expecting at all. From the trailer I was expecting a stereotypical man meets woman in Hollywood, falls in love, something goes wrong, gets resolved kind of movie, but what happened, threw me off a bit. I was also expecting the film to be very hard to engage with due to there being no dialogue from the actors, however the acting and expression combined with the music and camerawork made the film very easy to engage with anyway.

The film starts off with the actor George Valentin starring in one of his many silent films of the era. We see that he and his dog are most definitely people pleasers and enjoy their life in the show business. Upon a camera shoot outside a cinema, he bumps into a woman, Peppy Miller who then has a few photos taken with the famous actor. We soon learn that George’s onstage success differs greatly to his success with his partner at home. We see that his wife is very unhappy as he doesn’t give her much attention and gives his dog more love than he gives her. In a twist of social standings, the lady he bumped into becomes a famous star in the new style of films “talkies” using diegetic dialogue and the age of silent films ends, leaving George behind with it.

I enjoyed the film a lot, despite not having any dialogue in it, I could almost lip read what was being said by looking at the expression and techniques used when spoken. I picked up on a lot of techniques used in the film that I thought where very smart and added greatly to the overall success of the production. I mainly enjoyed seeing the contrast between the downfall of George and the rise of Peppy. Even the small details like the mise-en-scene showed the contrast between them. After hearing about the end of silent film, we immediately after see George stood on a lower level than Peppy indicating that he is falling while she is going up.

I would recommend this film to people who enjoy films with a clear and positive character development and like being able to look at a character at the end of a film and see how far they have come.