What Is It That Movies Are All About?

Rating: 10/10 (26 February 2012)

The Artist searches the ultimate fountains of movies. If you take everything else out, what is the essential? Could we take out the sound? The dialogs? The images? No, not the images. But is that what movies are all about? The reason to be? Not quite, at least I don't think so and I don't feel this way. We could not take the images, for sure, but that's because it's the media, the supporting language of movies. But maybe it's not yet the essential.
I studied language a lot at the university, it would be very boring and inappropriate to discuss it here, but it would be very useful to comment something about it. It's the "old" discussion, the "rivalry": which says more, or means more to us? Words or images? Words and images or silence? Images or music? If we put that way, though, it would seem that all these languages, all these ways to express feelings, thoughts and actions would be in an endless battle against each other, competing against each other, but it is not true. One media, one language, helps the other, works with the other. This is art and culture, this is language.
So, when we see a silent movie, it doesn't mean it has no words or dialogs. If we could see it, there would be an intense interchange of words, between silent movies and audiences. Words are all over it, in the big screen and in the atmosphere of the theater. We are all the time trying to put words in it, to understand. There's no way one could understand images, even sounds, without looking for words.
Sometimes they just aren't in the first plan of things, but they are there. There is just a difference in the focus, in the emphasis of what is being told and the way it's being told. Sometimes best communication comes with silence. But there are words deep inside the silence and all around it. So the essence of movies could not be just the images or just the silence. Also, it's not essential that you spell all the words, sonorous ones.
By watching The Artist in 2012 we spontaneously start thinking about those things. The answers or maybe the new questions should come from the story, from the movie. I actually made a list: audience, entertainment, art, magic, dream, visual effects, comedy, drama, adventure, mystery, there are a lot of very important roots composing the essence of movies. They are the elements of movies that combine in very different proportions in each project, like a DNA.
There seems to be, however, one element among all the others, that made movies what they are, that made movie industry and its alternatives what they are. Of course we know it, it's romance. Not always in the first plan, sometimes not visible in any plan, but it's there, like the words, it's the essence, what makes us understand movies. Even when it's denied, fought against or destroyed; it's the energy that works underneath. Or when there's a silence about love and romance in a movie, we miss it. But when it comes to the surface, we finally meet what we were looking for, what gives meaning to a not ordinary but very special life.
This is what movies are all about. None of us really want an ordinary life, we want it to be special and happy. We are not all the time thinking about love and romance, but that's the road where everything else we care about is. And that is what made The Artist a great movie. It is a wonderful story, a meaningful one, working with all these elements, roots and, of course, the essence of movies.