Synchronous Love: The Artist as an Allegory of Filmic Obsolescence

Alicia ChesterFilm as Object

Professor Joanne BernardiSpring 2014

“The ultimate goal of film history is an account of its own disappearance or its transformation

into another entity. In such a case, a narrating presence has the prerogative of resorting to the

imagination to describe the phases leading from the hypothetical Model Image to the complete

oblivion of what the moving image once represented.”1

“Film history comes to exist as such when moving image destruction is described and explained

in order to make clear the causes and patterns of decay . . . such description is affected by so

many unforeseeable factors that the language of the exact sciences is inadequate for the purpose.

On the other hand, film history is quite compatible with a narrating presence [XLII] and with the

goal of deciphering the traces left by each viewing on the relics of an entity recognised as being

no longer extant. The imaginary object will then be mirrored in an imaginary account: an

exercise in storytelling.”2

2

1 Paolo Cherchi Usai, “XLII. The ultimate goal of film history,” in The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), 89.

2 Ibid., “XLIII. The film historian must be a storyteller,” in The Death of Cinema, 91.

The Artist is an allegory of technological obsolescence told as a romance. A modern

black-and-white “silent” film directed by Michel Hazanavicius, the technological simplicity of

The Artist was risky in the wake of such digitally constructed and mega-budget blockbusters as

Avatar (2009).3 However, it premiered to acclaim at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and

subsequently won three Golden Globes and five Academy Awards in 2012, including Best

Picture. Running through the genres of romance, comedy, and drama, The Artist uses Hollywood

clichés and historical quotations as modes to reflect on two moments of technological

obsolescence: explicitly, that of silent film giving way to the “talkies,” and, implicitly, film itself

giving way to digital. As Mike McCahill wrote in his review of The Artist for The Telegraph:

Somewhere within The Artist’s more generalised nostalgia, there resides a romantic idea about celluloid as memory: as we prepare to enter a digital age characterised by pixels and noise, Hazanavicius reminds us there might be elements of the past worth preserving, pockets of resonant silence which speak louder than all the words uttered since.

Although not ostensibly its theme, undergirding the production of The Artist is an analogy

between its retrospective look to the transition from silent film to synchronized sound and the

current cinematic transition from analog to digital production and distribution. It seems that The

Artist represents the previous technological transition humorously and glamorously in efforts

both to revive the memory of cinema’s early silent era and to posit that the digital transition will

be as seamless and harmless as the movie’s comic and heartwarming story.4 Concerning film

history and preservation in his simultaneous lament and embrace of the inevitability of the

demise of film, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age,

Paolo Cherchi Usai states: “Experience teaches us that loss of memory is as inevitable as anxiety

3

3 Rebecca Keegan, “Buzz is growing over a silent film,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 2011.

4 Mike McCahill, “The Artist, Seven Magazine review,” The Telegraph, 27 February 2012.

for the future.”5 Through telling the meta-story of the history of early cinema in the guise of

fiction, The Artist subliminally forewarns against the physical destruction of material history in

the digital transition currently underway.

The Artist was produced with a mix of contemporary and re-created or simulated

outmoded technology on a relatively low budget.6 Like silent film before the incorporation of

optical soundtracks, The Artist has an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 rather than the now commonly used

1.85:1 or anamorphic 2.39:1 aspect ratios. It was shot at a rate of twenty-two frames per second

rather than the twenty-four frames standardized after the advent of sound, with the effect that the

film appears to move a little quickly—albeit just quickly enough to defamiliarize the image

rather than draw conscious attention to the effect.7 One may view this as a mistake, as silent

films were meant to be projected at the same frame rate at which they were shot—sixteen frames

per second was the average in the silent era8—or it could be viewed as a nod to our inherited idea

of silent film: after shooting and projection frame rates were standardized to twenty-four frames

per second, silent films were also screened at this rate, leading later sound-era audiences to

believe silent films had really appeared to move more quickly. This issue persists in the digital

age, with many silent films digitized at frame rates faster than the slower rates at which they

were shot.

This point aside, Hazanavicius and his cinematographer, Guillaume Schiffman, did not

remain completely faithful to silent-era film technology. They had special lenses fabricated to

4

5 Cherchi Usai, “XV. How do moving images come to exist?” in The Death of Cinema, 35.

6 Keegan quotes $14.2 million. In comparison, Avatar was budgeted at $237 million for production costs according to a Fox spokesperson interviewed by Josh Dickey, “Avatar’s True Cost—and Consequences,” The Wrap, 3 December 2009.

7 See Keegan concerning lenses, the aspect ratio, and the frame rate used to make The Artist.

8 Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), xiii.

simulate the gauzy look of 1940s era Hollywood film—a period following the years 1927–1932

encompassed by The Artist’s diegesis—and the film was shot with modern color stock and

converted to black and white in postproduction.9 Other vintage visual cues like vignetting, iris

wipe transitions, and flickering intertitles are plentiful. Hazanavicius and Schiffman’s

willingness to employ film technology not contemporaneous with The Artist’s diegesis points to

the production being a simulation rather than a true re-creation of a silent film, privileging the

look or style of silent film over remaining “true” to silent-era technology. In other words,

Hazanavicius and Schiffman chose technology—lenses, aspect ratio, frame rate, and film stock

—according to its ability to best simulate the look of silent film (or, at least, how modern

audiences think silent film looked) while still relying on the strengths of modern analog and

digital technology for easier production and manipulation.

The Artist embraces cliché and simplification—of history, characters, and plot—in the

interest of conveying a coherent narrative with minimal dialogue that becomes subordinate to the

story of film as a historical medium. The Artist opens in 1927, the year that The Jazz Singer, the

first synchronized sound “talkie,” debuted. Although there is no allusion to The Jazz Singer—

The Artist takes place in a fictional world that is very similar to, but not quite the same as, our

own—this historical context forms a backdrop to the diegesis. The Artist tells the story of a

famous and aging silent film star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), and a young, up-and-coming

“talking” film star, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo). Peppy meets George by accident at his film

premiere in the first sequence of The Artist, and she makes the most of it by mugging with him

for the press cameras. The next day she auditions and gets a bit role as a dancer in one of

5

9 Peter Debruge, “The Artist” (review), Daily Variety, 16 May 2011: 12.

George’s films at the Kinograph Motion Picture Company. Their romance kindles, but each

resists the attraction since George is married. He does help her get a start as an actress, though,

symbolized in the moment when he draws a beauty mark on her face to lend her a unique look

(fig. 1).

Their paths part ways with the decline of his career and the rise of hers, parallel to the fall

of silent film and rise of synchronized sound. George resists the transition to “talkies” even as

Peppy embraces it gladly (fig. 2). As Peppy smilingly and succinctly states (via intertitles) in an

interview the night before her big “talkie” premiere, Beauty Spot, “Out with the old, in with the

new. Make way for the young!” Unbeknownst to Peppy, however, George is dining in the same

restaurant in which she is being interviewed. His new but doomed-to-fail silent feature is also

premiering the next day. He approaches her and replies, “I made way for you,” asserting a direct

and chronological link from George to Peppy and, by extension, silent film to synchronized

sound. George becomes bankrupt through personally funding his failed film and due to the Stock

Market Crash of 1929. His career falls into ruin, his wife leaves him, and he descends into

obscurity and poverty. Peppy watches tearfully from afar, anonymously helping when she can.

A scene opens in 1932 in which a depressed George is watching his old movies in his

now-modest home. When the reel finishes, he confronts his own shadow in the white light of the

projector, scolding, “Look what’s become of you . . .” As George stands still with his shadow

looming menacingly on the screen, his shadow slowly turns and leaves the screen without him

(fig. 3). In a subsequent moment of enraged desperation, George rips apart his personal film

collection and sets it on fire (fig. 4). Although the nitrate fire does not spread as quickly and is

not as all-consuming as it would be in reality, the scene serves as a pivotal point in the story.

6

Realizing his mistake too late, George clutches the last intact film canister close to his heart

before passing out. His little dog runs for help and manages to get a policeman to rescue George

from the burning house. Later, in the hospital, Peppy visits him to make sure he is alright and to

take him to convalesce at her mansion. Before he wakes up, she finds the film canister he was

clutching during his rescue. She holds the reel up to a window and discovers that it is footage

from her first film—the only film they made together. The camera shot changes position to look

at Peppy through the window, which is divided with horizontal blinds reminiscent of the

divisions between film frames, as she looks through the reel (figs. 5–6). The scene in the reel

momentarily flickers on our screen in slow motion like a flip book, showing us what she sees.

The melding of filmic metaphors is completed by Peppy’s glittering hat and dress, which she was

wearing on set when she heard about the fire and rushed to the hospital. In contrast to George’s

silent and projected shadow, Peppy sparkles like a starlet on shining celluloid and the silver

screen.

This synopsis should demonstrate that the postmodern spirit of self-reference and

historical sampling carries beyond the director and cinematographer’s technological production

choices to appropriating film history itself. However, as evidenced by such fictional and generic

film-within-film titles as A Russian Affair and A German Affair, The Artist is fully conscious of

and has fun with its historical quotations. It openly and amusingly poaches the history of classic

cinema: camera shots include a composition of stairs reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Spies and

overhead shots and montages lifted from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane10; Bernard Herrmann’s

principle theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is adopted for a dramatic scene11; shooting

7

10 Debruge.

11 Philip French, “The Artist—review,” The Observer, 31 December 2011.

locations include Mary Pickford’s Hancock Park mansion, the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles,

and studio backlots at Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers12; slapstick gaffes and acts

reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin and tap dancing routines redolent of Fred Astaire and Ginger

Rogers abound; and even Peppy’s drawn-on beauty mark invokes iconic sex symbol Marilyn

Monroe, who made this “blemish” fashionable in the 1950s. Enjoying The Artist does not hinge

on recognizing these moments, however. If the audience does recognize them, their viewing

pleasure is heightened, but if not, these moments serve to create a generic atmosphere of

yesteryear’s familiar Hollywood glamour.

The Artist’s retro look may be considered nostalgic in Fredric Jameson’s sense of

postmodern pastiche—the present imitation of “dead” styles from the past—in “Postmodernism

and Consumer Society.” As an example of pastiche, Jameson describes the ‘nostalgia film’13 as

a narrative set in some indefinable nostalgic past . . . beyond history. . . . as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. . . . [This is a] symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.14

At first glance, this certainly appears to describe The Artist as a film appropriating styles of

fashion, film, and technology from the late 1920s to early 1930s, even while also sampling and

referencing styles from later eras. Rather than simply borrowing, fragmenting, and subsuming

the past into a form that appears new, however, The Artist embraces history with love: Through

the figure of romance, both as genre and symbol, The Artist precisely does try to deal with time

and history metonymically through film history and technology. Its double movement is to

8

12 Keegan.

13 “[P]astiche is not high-cultural but very much within mass culture, and it is generally known as the ‘nostalgia film’ (what the French neatly call la mode rétro—retrospective styling).” Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodernism and Its Discontents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: Verso, 1988), 18.

14 Ibid., 20.

acknowledge irreversible technological transitions even while drawing older technologies

alongside newer ones. It remembers rather than forgets while also never expressing a wish to

stop time, history, or technological change. Instead, it evinces a desire that history and the

present could be reconciled, rather than the past subsumed.

The Artist’s desire for technological and historical coexistence, as symbolized through the

happy ending of George Valentin and Peppy Miller’s professional and personal reunion, is more

closely aligned with Jameson’s account of modernism in “The End of Temporality” than his

description of nostalgia and pastiche in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In “The End of

Temporality,” Jameson describes modernism as an incomplete project characterized by the

coexistence of pre-modern and modern technologies and ways of life, citing the coexistence of

the peasantry and modern urbanism as a spatially discontinuous but temporally contemporaneous

example—at least until the suburbs eventually replaced villages:

I want to suggest an account in terms of something like existential uneven development; it fleshes out the proposition that modernism is to be grasped as a culture of incomplete modernization and links that situation to the proposition about modernism’s temporal dominant. . . . I want to conjecture that the protagonists of those aesthetic and philosophical revolutions were people who still lived in two distinct worlds simultaneously; born in those agricultural villages we still sometimes characterize as medieval or premodern, they developed their vocations in the new urban agglomerations with their radically distinct and “modern” spaces and temporalities. The sensitivity to deep time in the moderns then registers this comparatist perception of the two socioeconomic temporalities, which the first modernists had to negotiate in their own lived experience. By the same token, when the premodern vanishes, when the peasantry shrinks to a picturesque remnant, when suburbs replace the villages and modernity reigns triumphant and homogeneous over all space, then the very sense of an alternate temporality disappears as well, and postmodern generations are dispossessed (without even knowing it) of any differential sense of that deep time the first moderns sought to inscribe in their writing.15

9

15 Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29:4 (Summer 2003): 699.

When the suburbs did finally replace villages, Jameson posits that the new homogeneity of space

correlated with a flattening of temporality into being synchronic rather than diachronic: the

“sensitivity to deep time” characteristic of modernity, according to Jameson, was cultivated by

the coexistence and, hence, comparison of two socioeconomically different modes of life—pre-

modern agrarian society and modern industrialization and urbanization. Complete modernization

meant not only the homogenization of space but concurrently the loss of the temporally

comparative consciousness of pre-modern and modern modes of life. In other words, the

completion of the project of modernity corresponds with a loss of history. Without different

modes of life and their attendant alternate temporalities to offer comparison, modernity simply

becomes what is—“without even knowing it”—rather than what is consciously in the process of

becoming.

The Artist seeks to resurrect modernity’s “sensitivity to deep time”16 and diachronic

temporality through comparisons of silent and synchronized sound cinema as well as analog and

digital media. It cannot do this, however, through reference to the external world but through

reference to its own medium as film. Photographic media, including film, is usually thought to

provide a window to the external world, albeit from past moments, but The Artist provides a

view onto film history itself, not the external world. This shift from external to internal reference

is consonant with Jameson’s continued argument in “The End of Temporality,” in which he states

that postmodernity results in the “wholesale replacement of the old subject-object relationship,

the logic of reference, with a new one, which might better be called the semiotic or, indeed, the

logic of the signifier.”17 The Artist replaces references to an external world with signifiers

10

16 Ibid., 699.

17 Ibid., 705.

pointing to film history and technology—in other words, rather than referencing history as such,

The Artist signifies itself as a film.

It cannot self-signify by simply emulating silent productions, though, and The Artist is

not simply a silent film. It joyfully plays with the conventions of silent films even while

flaunting its postmodernity by using newer technology when convenient. This brings to mind

Ernst Bloch’s concept of the “nonsynchronous as the after-effect of older relations and forms of

production and older superstructures . . . [including] both declining remnants and, above all,

uncompleted past.”18 The Artist’s nonsynchronous sound reflects its nonsynchronous use of

outmoded styles and technology in an effort to resolve remnants of the past in the present. Its

double nonsynchronicity is a means to come to terms with cycles of technological change,

represented through the transition from silent film to synchronized sound as an allegory for the

current transition from analog celluloid to digital media.

Even so, we are never led to believe that The Artist is truly a silent production from the

early twentieth century. Instead, it takes film history as its rightful patrimony to adopt and adapt

as it sees fit. In his essay “The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded,” Christian Thorne draws

attention to the qualities of artisanal craftsmanship that early industrial processes accrue when

they become outmoded and, in retrospective comparison with newer technologies, simple:

Retro distinguishes itself from the more or less folkish quality of most national traditions in that it elevates to the status of custom the commodities of early mass production . . . and it does so by imbuing them with artisanal qualities, so that, in a strange historical inversion, the first industrial assembly lines come to seem the very emblem of craftsmanship. Retro is the process by which mass-produced trinkets can be reinvented as “heritage.”19

11

18 Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 31.

19 Christian Thorne, “The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded,” October 104 (Spring 2003): 103.

From an early point in its history, Hollywood studios produced films modeled on the division of

labor intrinsic to industrial factories. While The Artist does appropriate and quote renowned

moments from auteur and “high art” films throughout the early to mid-twentieth century—these

samples “meant to function as a genetic link . . . to serve as a tangible connection back to some

originary moment”20—the film also transparently mimics the mass-produced nature of

Hollywood films by depicting studios churning out one cheesy romance after another. The Artist

nostalgically claims these “mass-produced trinkets” as its ancestral heritage.

To find a way beyond Thorne’s take on the retro appropriation of outmoded modes of

production as heritage—as well as to find a way through Jameson’s pessimistic lament for the

concomitant loss of modernity and history and his account of postmodernity as spacial

homogenization and temporal flattening—Joel Burges’s phrase figuration of the outmoded

proves both appropriate and useful: “a temporal interweaving occurs, in which older and newer

media are juxtaposed as so many embattled agents from the past and the present of capitalist

modernity.”21 The juxtaposition of older and newer media is explicit in The Artist in the form of

silent and synchronized sound film during the transitional period it depicts, and implicit in our

own moment of transition from analog to digital media. Burges goes on to say:

[F]igurations of the outmoded couple two moments as well: one earlier, one later. But rather than situate the later moment as the historical fulfillment of the earlier one, as a “prefiguration” in which the “relation between . . . two events is revealed by an accord or similarity,” a figuration of the outmoded highlights discord and dissimilarity between the two moments it puts into play.22

12

20 Ibid.

21 Joel Burges, “Adorno’s Mimeograph: The Uses of Obsolescence in Minima Moralia.” New German Critique 118, Special Issue on Adorno (Winter 2013): 74.

22 Ibid., 75.

The Artist may thus be viewed as a figuration of the outmoded, representing the continued

existence of outmoded technology within the present—reminiscent of Bloch’s nonsynchronism

as being “unsurmounted remnants of older economic being and consciousness”23—in order to

raise diachronic, comparative consciousness of two points in time: silent film persisted for a time

in the sound era, and analog media continues to persist in the digital era.

Classifying The Artist as a figuration of the outmoded rubs against the diegesis’s

teleological grain in order to “[highlight] discord and dissimilarity between the two moments it

puts into play.” It is a figuration of the outmoded not in its diegesis, but in its form: It is a film

created in 2011 that takes its own creation as a simulation of silent-era productions as its true

content. This is especially evident in the use of outmoded technology for its production,

including lenses, frame rate, aspect ratio, and, of course, non-diegetic and non-synchronous

sound. (Here I do not include black-and-white film among the outmoded technologies, since The

Artist was shot with modern color stock and converted in postproduction.) The diegetic content

—the story—is the supportive carrier for the film’s form as a mostly “silent” production, not the

other way around.

Whereas Burges wants to denaturalize any teleological imperative in the telling of

history, The Artist, in contrast, does posit synchronized sound as the natural fulfillment of the

earlier historical moment of silent cinema—or, to reverse the terms, it posits silent film as a

“prefiguration” of synchronized sound cinema, even though the two forms coexisted for the

period of time The Artist’s diegesis depicts. This is visible in shots of sound technology

throughout the film (record players, phonographs, microphones, recording equipment for radio),

13

23 Bloch, 29.

signage in the scenes (one prominent sign backstage in a movie palace states “PLEASE BE

SILENT BEHIND THE SCREEN”), and people yelling, screaming, covering their ears, and

laughing—all without any synchronized sound to be heard. George Valentin even signs one

photograph of him with his dog with an autograph saying, “Woof!”—as if to give voice to his

dog.

The opening scene of The Artist takes place in a movie palace for the premiere of a silent

film starring George Valentin, and the movie palace’s live orchestral accompaniment for this

fictional film-within-a-film coincides with The Artist’s soundtrack for several minutes. It is only

when the film-within-a-film ends and the movie palace’s audience bursts into visible applause do

we realize that The Artist is also a silent film. We do not hear their applause and cheers, but only

silence followed by the slow introduction of The Artist’s own musical soundtrack. The musical

crescendo of the movie palace’s orchestra followed by these moments of absolute silence leads

us, The Artist’s audience, to feel the lack of sound poignantly and with a small shock of surprise.

These moments of silence instill a desire in us to hear the movie—a desire that is frustrated for

most of the film, albeit cleverly, amusingly, and pleasurably so, but which is eventually fulfilled.

The Artist’s frustration and eventual fulfillment of our desire parallels within the viewer the

film’s assertion of a natural progression from silent to synchronized sound cinema.

However, the most pellucid examples of The Artist positing a historical, teleological, and

natural progression from silence to sound are found in language itself in the guise of intertitles.

Talking becomes both a diegetic and self-reflexive motif. In The Artist’s opening scene in the

movie palace, we take pleasure in reading the intertitles for the film-within-a-film starring

George Valentin, in which he portrays a hero who is captured and tortured by electrocution for

14

information. However, his character remains strong and declares, “I won’t talk! I won’t say a

word!!!” to which his torturers reply, “SPEAK!” (figs. 7–9). This blatant and amusing

foreshadowing of the aging silent film star’s downfall with the rise of “talkies” makes George

into a figuration of the outmoded technology of silent film from the outset of The Artist. Upon

seeing a screening of synchronized sound tests, George protests to his producer: “I’m the one

people come to see. They never needed to hear me!” His resistance to talking reaches a new level

in the diegesis when his disgruntled wife approaches him to discuss their marriage: “We have to

talk, George,” and, “Why do you refuse to talk?” The constant assertion of the audience’s desire

to hear George is thus playfully frustrated by the fact that this desire is mirrored and

communicated in written form. Although we never hear Peppy either, her rise to fame as a young

“talking” star makes her into a figuration of new sound technology. The only song with vocals in

The Artist’s soundtrack is a 1930s jazz tune that accompanies a montage of Peppy’s growing

success. Her alignment with talking and synchronized sound is further emphasized by her “loud”

gestures and expressive mouth, and Peppy does most of the talking while George listens

attentively in the majority of their scenes together. Throughout The Artist, constant indications of

sound—in the forms mentioned above of picturing sound recording technologies, people

speaking and laughing, and characters gesturing to mouths and ears—purposefully lead us to

believe that audiences were always waiting for sound, and that synchronized sound is the natural

fulfillment of cinema as a medium.

The Artist’s conspicuous clapperboards fill a similar role as the intertitles, using language

to inform the audience about various scenes—specifically, fictional film-within-film scenes

within The Artist’s diegetic scenes. A clapperboard—also known as a clapper, clapboard, sync

15

slate, time slate, or sound marker—was not a clapperboard for a silent film production, of course.

It was simply a slate board stating information about the production and scene. A clapper was

added with the advent of synchronized sound in order to make synchronization easier: clapping

the board creates an easily identifiable mark both visually in the film frames and audibly in the

soundtrack (as well as visually in the case of optical soundtracks), allowing the two to be

perfectly synchronized in postproduction. The slate boards used to display information about the

silent films starring George Valentin noticeably lack clappers (figs. 10–11), and these shots give

way over the course of the movie to clapperboards introducing films with synchronized sound

starring Peppy Miller. The slate boards and clapperboards reinforce the alignment of George with

older silent technology and Peppy with newer sound technology.

George pays the price for his continued resistance to the end of silent cinema and the

coming of sound. After making fun of the synchronized sound screen tests, he has a nightmare

revealing his anxieties and foreshadowing his career’s steep decline. While in his dressing room,

George sets a glass down and is as surprised as we are to hear it make a sound. He examines the

glass, repeats the gesture, and hears it land with a light thud again when he sets it down. He

begins to similarly test other objects on his vanity, and sounds from the street outside slowly fill

the room. Try as he might, however, George cannot make a sound when he tries to speak. His

dog barks, his telephone rings, and a cacophony of external sounds fill the room. He silently

yells and runs out to the street, where an increasing number of identically dressed young

actresses walk by and laugh. Once they pass, we hear the wind pick up, and George’s eyes follow

a feather as it makes its way to the ground, landing with the boom of a gunshot. He wakes up

terrified and sweating. The motif of the glass forebodingly recurs in two later shots: George sets

16

a glass on newspapers with headlines declaring the Stock Market Crash of 1929 (fig. 12), and he

pours out his drink onto a mirrored tabletop, momentarily obliterating his own image, in an

ominous shot introducing the year 1932 (figs. 13–14).

Following his professional and personal decline and leading to the resolution of the story,

Peppy rescues George from a near-suicide, subsequent to the nitrate fire. During this scene,

George places a gun tellingly in his mouth, followed by an intertitle reading “BANG!” Our heart

jumps, but upon cutting back to the scene, we see that, just like sound and outmoded technology

in The Artist, this intertitle is surprisingly nonsynchronous. The gun has not gone off, as if the

power of the gun’s BANG had been displaced to George’s earlier nightmare, in which the feather

landed with the sound of a booming gunshot. George is alive, and Peppy runs into the scene to

save him from despair and his career from ruination. In their reconciling embrace, a relieved but

still-depressed George says, “It’s impossible, Peppy. I’m washed up. No one wants to see me

speak” (fig. 15).24 However, Peppy thinks of a “sound” way around speaking: she convinces

George to perform a synchronized tap dance with her (fig. 16). The Artist’s ubiquitous

clapperboards are incorporated into this final scene’s musical number allegorizing the

completion of the transition from silent film to synchronized sound: a line of young men wearing

tuxedos and holding clapperboards fan out in synchronization while the camera zooms through

them to reach George and Peppy (fig. 17). The happy couple pull off a good imitation of Fred

Astaire and Ginger Rogers as they tap in unison around a film studio stage, finally united as

dance and romantic partners in their new production, Sparkle of Love. Throughout The Artist,

17

24 Emphasis mine.

their romantic timing had been out of sync, but the happy musical ending ensures that the sounds

of their feet and their hearts are finally synchronized (fig. 18).

We distinctly hear the actors catching their breath at the end of their number, and with

heightened expectation we hear the director yell “Cut!” and the producer exclaim, “Perfect!

Beautiful!” These first moments of synchronized dialogue in the film become more shocking,

however, when the producer asks for one more take and George replies with a French accent,

“with pleasure.” His accent propels us out of the diegetic world of 1930s Hollywood to make us

aware of the identity of the man portraying George Valentin: Jean Dujardin, a French actor who

could not have played an American film star if the movie had not been silent. George Valentin

finds his voice with Peppy Miller’s help—whose own voice, interestingly enough, we never hear

—but once the fourth wall is shattered by Jean Dujardin’s accent, the film comes to a close with

the camera slowly pulling back to reveal the production studio. Rather than remaining with the

diegetic resolution of the protagonists’ romance, The Artist’s resolution lies instead in rendering

its audience fully conscious of the completed technological transition to synchronized sound. The

Artist begins with the premiere of a silent film in a movie palace in 1927, but it ends with the

production of a synchronized sound film in 1932. As the camera pulls back, we hear the hustle

and bustle of a busy Hollywood studio: “Listen up everybody! Quiet please! Here we go! And

roll sound! Roll camera! Silence please! And action!” As the screen goes black and credits roll,

we understand that George and Peppy continue their synchronized dance on the silver screen.

18

fig. 1

fig. 2

19

fig. 3

fig. 4

20

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–––. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In Postmodernism and Its Discontents, 13–29. Editor E. Ann Kaplan. London: Verso, 1988.

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