After the movie, i wanted to stand there forever and clap till my hands would wear out.. the audience walked out noisily before the credits rolled ..the theatre had a handful of audience some of whom had moved away to darker corners in search of privacy. . the nation’s most famous multiplex theatre had employees who either had the brains of a hare or the heart of a hyena, else there wouldn’t have been a cut in the movie at 40 minutes for a desi style snack break ..this is just one of the sacrileges , a movie like ‘artist ‘ has to face to survive the crass ness of the movie market..
George valentin, the protoganist in the movie undergoes nothing less. The artist is a powerful movie, one of those epics that redeem the tragedy of a ‘fall’ in the everlasting gardens of aesthetic art form..
The movie is about a silent movie superstar whose fall coincides with the rise of talkies – this is personified in the character of peppy miller who is just a sidekick in the silent movie era and who owes her screen appearances to the initial kindness of George valentine, but who goes on to become the Hollywood sweet heart in the talkie era. The rest of the movie describes in subtle imagery , the penury of George valentin’s fall along with the growing admiration and affection of peppy miller towards the former even when he is becoming a shadow of his former self
This is certainly not a new story, but it certainly is not a cliché, as one of my friends has exclaimed. The newness is not in the story, but, in the vision, in the human touch and in the questions it raises in the mind of the audience . these questions, we remind ourselves with so much pity, have no definite answers.
Have we ever been bored of the moon ? have we ever said, oh, the same crescent? The story of a man’s rise and fall , the magnificence of the contrast of the rags and the riches is too close to a man’s heart to ever become a cliché.
The movie asks some fundamental questions. What does the artist mean to the society? Is he dispensable even in a capitalist model of world where markets determine what art is to be seen and what should not be seen?
What are the options for the artist in a changing world? His stubbornness is characterised as vanity and pride , it would make a good picture , though..but his willingness to go with the flow is decried as a COMPROMISE..is there any way out?
The movie knows too well that answers are not what make an epic..the movie reminded me of another Indian classic- guru dutt’s kaagaz ke phool and brought to a faltering memory, the likes of Chandra babu, thyagaraja bagavadar, v k ramamsamy , kanchana and many more who made everything and lost everything in cinema..
At one scene, the hero realises that he is living in a world of his own, where the sounds are absorbed into themselves and everything is explained in gestures of ethereal beauty while the world outside wishes even the dogs would talk ..such was the frenzy, talkies must have created in the lives of silent movie stars.. i remembered reading about akira kurasowa’s brother, who was working as a narrator in the silent movies . He committed suicide, when the talkies robbed him of his employment. May be it was more than that. It is the robbing of one’s own existential purpose. What a person, has believed , is his life’s meaning. How can the removal of that be lived with? i still remember with sparkling vividity the tremor in the face of a therukoothu artiste, who while performing as raavanan, made a short detour to describe the struggle his life had become everyday in a world of decadent values and decaying villages.. it would do well to understand that koothu artists are one of the highly skilled and trained whose mastery goes beyond the confines of any written grammar. This is the significance of the 'artist' in our lives. he entertains us, thinks we will look after him in his failures or bear with his shortcomings, but, we , in the mad race for survival, inevitably ignore the unsuccessful, little knowing that the circles of life might soon bring us to the same point in the circumference....But the pain of an artist's fall is indescribable....Ironically,in one of the scenes, the artist auctions his own portrait to raise money so as to escape bankruptcy. The memory of all those nameless portrait artists who lost their livelihood with the entry of still cameras and motion cameras flashes in our mind, barely, bringing a smile that would get lost in our tired sleeps.
When the movie started, i had prayed to my stars to give me the strength to sit through a silent movie. I am one of those people who live and die on the seashores of words. But as i walked to the parking lot, i listened to the sounds of footsteps and bike engines with the ears of a newborn and then i realised how superfluous sounds actually are , in human life, even if only for a second..perhaps, there is no other image that could better explain the impact of a movie like artist..
