13.01.2012 / Arts & Culture
Without Words
The news is fresh from last night: The Artist by Michel Hazanavicius has won Best Picture honors at the Critic’s Choice Movie Awards.
Not a bad outcome for a silent movie on silent movies – or rather on their decline – that charmed the critics as well as the audience, at leat according to its box office results.
The reason for such an amazing success may be summed up in three elements: a couple of great actors, a well-tested plot (a silent movie star dealing with the advent of talkies, just like Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard) and the absence of a dialogue soundtrack, replaced by classic intertitles, an emphatic but plausible acting, and music.
The original soundtrack composed by Ludovic Bource, is an essential element in this movie.
Performed by the Flanders Philharmonic Orchestra directed by Ernst van Tiel, the music is not just an accompaniment to the action – it’s a sort of frame defining the world and the atmospheres that inspired the film’s director, built through popolar hits of that time (the movie is set between 1927 and the Thirties) and cinematic quotes.
The soundtrack also includes an exact quote of Bernard Herrmann‘s score for Vertigo, which unleashed the anger of Kim Novak, the unforgettable protagonist of Hitchcock’s movie.
In short, what appears to be a silent movie where images are the key feature is actually a talking film, only in a more noble and musical sense. Because sometimes, like an old pop song says, “words are very unnecessary”.
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