365 Days. 365 Films.

The Artist is a new silent movie about the early days in cinema when ‘talkies’ started to take over the movie business. Jean Dujardin stars as George Valentin, a silent movie star whose career takes a turn for the worse when sound hits the big screen, which isn’t helped by his off screen love affair with the new face of talking cinema.
Everyone has been saying how original this film is, when in fact it isn’t – silent films were the norm before 1927, and even in the 1970s Mel Brooks made Silent Movie. These are the things that were going through my mind as I began to watch this film – How original could it really be? In actual fact, by utilising the primitive aspects of cinema to their advantage, they are able to create a piece of art, not just a movie.

This is a film about film, taking it’s audience back to a time when it was all new, when films were a novelty and when only a few films opened each week. The Artist is a novelty to modern day audiences and it is a very entertaining film containing everything you might hope for in a film these days, but more than the novelty of it, it is a genuinely beautiful piece of cinema that will make you laugh, cry and want to discover more about earlier cinema.