Michel Hazanavicius's silent black-and-white film about the silent-to-sound transition. Best Picture 2011. The first silent film to win since Wings in 1929.
Hollywood, 1927-1932. George Valentin is a silent-film star at the height of his commercial success. He encounters Peppy Miller, a young aspiring actress, in a moment of accidental flirtation that the studio gossip machinery records. The studio decides to transition to sound-era production; George refuses to participate, believing that talking pictures are a passing novelty. Peppy embraces the new format and becomes a major sound-era star. George's career collapses; he loses his marriage, his money, and his self-respect across the subsequent years.
The film tracks George's collapse across approximately five years. Peppy, in parallel, becomes a major Hollywood figure but maintains her affection for George — the moment of accidental flirtation in 1927 has remained important to her. The film closes with Peppy persuading George to participate in a new sound-era project — a musical-dance film — and with the two stars finally performing a tap-dance number together. The film's audio register, which has been silent for almost all of the runtime, briefly opens to actual recorded sound for the dance number.
The Artist is, structurally, a silent black-and-white film made in 2011 and released theatrically in the contemporary commercial-cinema environment. The film uses the 1.33:1 aspect ratio characteristic of silent-era cinema (rather than the contemporary widescreen ratios); the title cards convey dialogue (rather than diegetic sound); the orchestral score (composed by Ludovic Bource) carries the emotional content (rather than the dialogue). The structural decision required the production to recreate, almost completely, the working conventions of late-1920s American cinema.
The choice was, in 2011, almost commercially impossible to imagine. Mainstream contemporary audiences had not been asked to engage with silent cinema in any significant theatrical capacity for over eighty years. The film's success against this commercial assumption was substantial — the film grossed $133m worldwide on a $15m budget and won five Oscars including Best Picture. The success demonstrated that audiences would, under specific circumstances, engage with formal cinematic experiments that conventional studio production would not have green-lit.
The Artist won five Oscars at the 2012 ceremony — Best Picture, Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius), Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Original Score (Ludovic Bource), and Best Costume Design. Jean Dujardin's Best Actor win was the first by a French actor in the category's history.
The Best Picture win was, in some sense, the Academy's late acknowledgement that prestige-cinema craft achievement could be honoured even outside conventional narrative-and-production frameworks. The Artist is structurally unusual for a Best Picture winner; almost no other film in the post-1950 era has won the prize while operating outside conventional sound-era cinematic conventions. The win demonstrated that the Academy's voting body retained appreciation for the foundational craft of cinema beyond the contemporary commercial-cinema register.
Twelve-plus years after release, The Artist remains a structurally interesting case. The film is, on first viewing, a romantic-comedy with a meta-textual silent-era setting. On subsequent viewings, the film's specific craft achievements become more visible. The choreography of physical comedy across silent-cinema conventions. The use of small dramatic-irony moments that depend on the audience knowing more than the silent-cinema characters do. The integration of the dog Uggie (who became a minor international celebrity around the time of release) as a comic supporting figure.
The film's specific contribution to subsequent cinema has been limited. The expected wave of silent-era-inspired contemporary cinema did not materialise; The Artist remains, in some sense, a one-off achievement rather than the start of a sustained movement. What the film did demonstrate is that the silent-cinema register continues to be available to working filmmakers as a deliberate authorial choice rather than as historical curiosity.