Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

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СКАЧАТЬ story of The Artist is a variation on the theme of another Hollywood favorite, A Star Is Born: “An older, established star helps a talented young woman on the path to fame, only to see his career decline as she hits the big time.”⁴ Although A Star Is Born is not about Hollywood history, it is very much about what is needed to succeed there. The various remakes produce a kind of index of how Hollywood developed. The best-known version is probably George Cukor’s of 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, and Hollywood anecdotes gather around it. Cukor had directed a 1932 film—originally titled The Truth about Hollywood and eventually What Price Hollywood?—loosely based on real-life Hollywood personalities. At first he refused to direct A Star Is Born, because the plot was close to that of the earlier film, but he relented when he thought about how different it would be to direct a musical, particularly one that was in Technicolor.⁵

      As he set about casting the film, Cukor is said to have offered Marlon Brando the role of Norman Maine during the filming of Wolf Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953). “Why would you come to me?” asked Brando. “I’m in the prime of my life . . . If you’re looking around for some actor to play an alcoholic has-been, he’s sitting right over there”—and he pointed at his costar in the Shakespeare film, James Mason, who indeed got the part.⁶ Mason and Garland were both nominated for Oscars for A Star Is Born, as had been Janet Gaynor and Fredric March for the 1937 version. None of them won. For Groucho Marx, Judy Garland not winning the Oscar was “the greatest robbery since Brinks’s.” Another remake in 1976 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.

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ