Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth
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did win one, when Barbra Streisand got “Best Music, Original Song.”
The Artist reworks the Star Is Born theme, situating it just before the talkies era but eliminating the tragic ending in which the male lead commits suicide. It is 1927, and George Valentin, played by Jean Dujardin, is a dashing and lovable silent movie star, handsome and with period eyebrows and moustache. He likes to appear on-screen in the company of his adorable little dog, a Jack Russell called Uggie, presumably an allusion to Toto. Valentin surely makes us think of Rudolph Valentino in his preferred role of mysterious adventurer and of Gene Kelly, with that toothy smile, and also, as a reminder that the director is French, of Maurice Chevalier in his top hat, white tie, and tails. The Artist is a black-and-white silent film that raises in delightfully comic form the issues that arose in the transition to talkies.
The Artist opens with the kind of trick that recurs in film history. Valentin is playing the hero of his new movie, and at first we do not realize this is a scene from that movie: the Russian baddies are seen torturing his character, with electrodes fitted to his skull, trying appropriately enough to make him talk. We then cut to the cheering crowds outside, and a pert little ingenue (Peppy, played by Bérénice Bejo) somehow blunders past the police line and winds up kissing Valentin on the cheek, to the photographers’ delight. Their flirtation, and her infatuation with him, earns her a break in pictures, but George is married, albeit unhappily, and so an affair is not to be. Peppy embraces the new technology of the talkies while he grumpily rejects them as a mere fad.
In a scene near the beginning, they repeatedly rehearse a dance routine but cannot get it right, so much are they laughing. We see them looking at each other with deadly seriousness, realizing they have just fallen in love. All is done on-screen, through images: the movie persists with its silent-era intertitles for dialogue, almost to the end. George, we have learned, is temperamentally averse to talking (even when his wife begs him). In his hotheaded way, he believes that talkies are crass and that he is the artist of the title. Silence is his art: what counts is spectacle and the ecstasy of seeing.
The filming of Shakespeare’s plays makes much use of the issues raised in both Hugo and The Artist, that is to say, in the early silent films and in the transition to the talkies. The use of such cinematic illusions is most obvious for the plays in which magic and the supernatural are represented. Those films in particular exploit the kinds of trick photography or trucage that has always been part of movie tradition (as in Hugo). But that does not mean that it is only these plays and films in which the language of film is used to produce illusions. In Olivier’s 1944 Henry V, for example, the onstage chorus at the Globe pulls across a stage curtain that metamorphoses into a kind of gauze through which a medium-long shot of Southampton comes into focus as we watch the preparations of Henry’s fleet for war with France. This is also the moment when the metatheatrical dimension of the film (pretending that we are at a live performance at the Globe) shifts into filmic and indeed metacinematic mode: the Chorus speaks not from the Globe stage but in the filmic register of voice-over to request “Eke out our performance with your mind.” After an interlude to dispose of the promised Falstaff by means of what Olivier calls a “prying camera” taking us through an upper window of the Boar’s Head tavern while Mistress Quickly describes his death,7 the aerial chorus conducts us to France with an overhead shot of a model armada appearing to surge through the sea. When we get to the French court it appears first as the manuscript illuminations from Très riches heures du duc de Berry. Soon, however, when the battle of Agincourt is filmed, a mile-long set of tracks allows the camera to keep up with the charge of the French cavalry, intercut with shots of the waiting English army. The film thus balances these various kinds of staged scenes—on the one hand the medieval and frankly artificial sequences based on the duc de Berry reading his own book and on the other the dynamic and realistic war. Thus, even though the play itself does not call for magic or the supernatural, the film exploits the kinds of cinematic tricks that are often used to present fantasy and insists on the standard contrast with the realism that has become endemic to movies. Here too the key transitional device is drawing the curtain.
2
MÉLIÈS AND THE PIONEERS
FROM ITS BEGINNINGS the art of film has pulled in two different directions: toward realism and toward magic.1 One tendency derives from the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, who came to film from photography and tried to reproduce time and event accurately—a train arriving at the station of La Ciotat or workers leaving the Lumière factory. This trend was restricted by the Hollywood conventions that came to govern the industry, based as they were, like Lodovico Castelvetro’s version of Aristotle,2 on a distrustful sense of the spectators’ limitations: what will the poor sap be able to understand? But it reappears in many more appealing ways, as in the documentary impulse, in Direct Cinema, or in the hyperrealism of a Mike Leigh. The Lumière workers knew what was going on and were all in their best work clothes, though the shot is designed to look as if it is what happened every day. Thus, the impulse to record staged performances was there from the early years of cinema. Indeed, the earliest surviving Shakespeare film is a minute-long fragment of Beerbohm Tree’s 1899 King John, shown on-screen in the Palace Theatre of Varieties on Shaftesbury Avenue but announcing the stage production as “now playing at Her Majesty’s Theatre.”3 The other tendency, quite different from what the Lumière brothers were doing, is the tradition of Georges Méliès the illusionist, many of whose films, like one version of the title of his Shakespeare film, had the words nightmare or dream in their titles. The Lumières are frequently said to have recorded reality; Méliès transformed it.
Film magic began with Méliès.4 At first there was a strong continuity with theatrical magic shows (which included as regular attractions a magic-lantern show and a shadow projection).5 But Méliès quickly realized how much more film could do and invented many new tricks that celebrate the possibilities of the new medium. The vanishing-lady trick is a good example. In this classic magic act, a cloth is placed over the seated woman, and when it is removed she has disappeared. Méliès discovered that he could stop the camera while the woman got out, then start it rolling again to whisk away the cloth. Through that simple stop-action method (or substitution splicing), which has become a basic film technique,6 reel time was liberated from real time. Two years later (1898) Méliès was already doing more-complex transformations, as when the magician leaps from a table and turns into his female assistant in midair. Méliès repeated this kind of stop-substitution trick countless times,7 and he quickly invented other tricks including dissolve, multiple-exposure (surimpression) or transparency for a ghost walking across a room through chairs and tables, and matte shots such that two Méliès can seem to observe and face each other.8 The first Hamlet ghost recorded on-screen, in Hay Plumb’s 1913 Hamlet, uses the double-exposure trick; soon it became widespread, as in Victor Sjöström’s famous movie Phantom Carriage (1921).
Despite what is sometimes said about Méliès and his followers, they were not working for an audience of credulous bumpkins. Their shows depend on a double sense of belief and incredulity, as Méliès’s theatre of magic depended on a decline in belief in the supernatural. We admire the magician’s skill, and in film we admire the power of the apparatus. Successful illusion is still understood as illusion, even if we cannot see exactly how it is done. Furthermore, the prevalence of images of machines such as the train and the rocket that goes to the moon in Méliès’s best-known film, Voyage to the Moon (1902), directs our attention (or reflection) toward the mechanical power of the means of reproduction.9
Beyond his obvious delight in trucage in the films, and thus in the sequence of shots, Méliès was the first to establish the basic principles by which the structure of a complete film could be fashioned. His idea of what he called “artificially arranged scenes” made film a medium in which a whole story could be told, as in Cinderella (1900), the first of his films to have a major impact in America.10 In his original plan the film is a sequence of twenty scenes, or “motion tableaux,” as he called them.11 These scenes could be staged and selected especially for the camera, such that the moviemaker could control both the material