Tag Archives: film history

SONIA BRAND-FISHER: Watching Michel Hazanavicius’s 2011 silent film, “The Artist,” made me feel as if I were in a cathedral of cinema history. A cathedral is a place, mostly silent except for a few camera clicks and prayers, that is simultaneously meant to teach and inspire those who seek spiritual refuge from the rapidly changing world. Film is a medium that has undergone revelations and revolutions, represented in the stories told by movie stars, whose faces we recognize as quickly, if not quicker than, any apostle. “The Artist” allowed for me to sit in the theatre and gaze up at these figures who were re-enacting the turbulence that was the transition to the talking pictures. Icons in their own right, both the film’s protagonists, George Valentin and Peppy Miller, framed in the stained glass light of a silver screen, act as intercessors between the audience and cinema’s history in a film that could only have been made in 2011. Continue reading →