The audacious French film The Artist has been building buzz among film lovers since May, when it wowed audiences at the Cannes Film Festival. Leading man Jean Dujardin won the event’s Best Actor prize for a performance that is nearly wordless, because The Artist is a tribute to the classic 1920s era of silent movies. Shot in black and white (and, for those paying attention, a retro aspect ratio), Michael Hazanavicius’ charming movie is a love letter to a time when the movies were candy-coated confections featuring beautiful people whose faces were so expressive that the lack of recorded dialogue did not inhibit their ability to communicate.
Although The Artist may end up becoming the most celebrated throwback thus far to silent cinema (it’s considered a major contender for an Oscar nomination as Best Picture), Hazanavicius’ movie isn’t the first contemporary film to recall the larger-than-life cinematic pleasures of yesteryear. So, on the occasion of The Artist‘s arrival in America (it opens in limited release later this month), here are some previous highlights of modern wordless filmmaking. (By the way, this list mostly comprises mainstream narrative movies, so it should be noted that plenty of cult-favorite arthouse filmmakers, like Canadian experimentalist Guy Maddin, regularly make wordless movies seen and appreciated by miniscule audiences.)
Arguably the most famous silent passages in all of contemporary cinema occur at the beginning and end of a sound film. For his trippy sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), director Stanley Kubrick created a nonverbal prologue featuring prehistoric apes discovering that a dried bone can be used as a weapon. At the end of the sequence, one of the apes tosses the bone into the air, and Kubrick cuts thousands of years forward by matching the movement of the bone with that of an orbiting space station. Then, at the conclusion of the picture, Kubrick unleashes a phantasmagoric barrage of special effects, including FX wizard Douglas Trumbull’s legendary “slit-screen” imagery, to depict man’s possible journey toward a new and more highly evolved state of being. Together, these sequences comprise about 30 minutes of dialogue-free cinema, which was incredibly daring at the time.
Prior to The Artist, the most overt modern homage to silent movies was director Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, released in 1976. A characteristically silly Brooks farce about a modern-day filmmaker who decides to make a brand-new silent flick, the cheerful but uninspired Silent Movie was a disappointment after Brooks’ previous triumphs Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974), because it got tiresome watching Brooks (who played the lead role in addition to directing), mugging his way through over-the-top slapstick. Still, Brooks committed wholeheartedly to the gimmick, using silent-era comedy tropes like delivering punch lines on title cards and speeding up the camera to create frenetic action. He also got several mid-’70s Hollywood stars to play cameos, including James Caan, Liza Minnelli, Paul Newman, and Burt Reynolds. Plus, in his funniest touch, Brooks gave the movie’s only line of dialogue to the world’s most famous mime, Marcel Marceau.
It may come as no surprise to learn that David Lynch, the high priest of American cinematic weirdness, once experimented with nearly wordless cinema. His breakout movie, the disturbing sci-fi parable Eraserhead (1979), features a string of gruesome and/or unpleasant black-and-white images strung together with a bare minimum of dialogue, to the point that Eraserhead is almost a silent film. And though few viewers can actually grasp the whole shape of the picture’s bizarre story on first viewing, there’s no question that Eraserhead is more of a narrative feature than a pure experiment; whether it’s worth penetrating the sickening mysteries of characters including anguished everyman Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) and his caterwauling mutant baby, however, is entirely a matter of taste.
Before Hazanavicius created The Artist, his fellow Frenchman Jean-Jacques Annaud took the possibilities of silent cinema in a different direction with Quest for Fire (1981), the celebrated story of prehistoric warriors trying to replace their fire source because they haven’t yet learned how to generate flames. Since the story concerns primitive people who communicate through gestures and grunts instead of language, Annaud made the movie without dialogue, creating an immersive experience that netted awards including a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and a César Award (the French equivalent to the Oscar) for Best Film. FYI, Annaud returned to the realm of nearly wordless nature cinema a few years later with The Bear (1988), but the latter film not enjoy the same level of acclaim as its predecessor.
Yet another Gallic filmmaker, action specialist Luc Besson, took the silent route with his 1983 action picture Le dernier combat (released in English-speaking markets as The Final Combat). A black-and-white post-apocalyptic tale about roving warriors battling each other for food and shelter in a world where people have been rendered incapable of speech, Le dernier combat isn’t particularly memorable, and one could argue that Besson took the easy route toward silent cinema by focusing on visceral action instead of subtle character interplay, but the fan-favorite filmmaker gets points for setting aside the customary tool of dialogue and looking for new ways to communicate narrative information.
Although it’s primarily a sound film, director Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) belongs on this list because of an extended sequence depicting the titular ape man’s upbringing in a simian community. Venerable screenwriter Robert Towne, of Chinatown fame, envisioned Greystoke as an artistic take on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous pulp-fiction character, so he wrote a script in which Tarzan’s adoption and education by a group of wild apes is depicted wordlessly. For the resulting sequence, which runs about 30 minutes, Hudson features only grunts, music, and sound effects while Tarzan (played as an adult by Christopher Lambert) learns the way of the jungle, fighting off invading wild animals and even nefarious adversaries within the ape community. The sequence remains one of the most ambitious dialogue-free passages in modern Hollywood history, and the movie as a whole is a fun source of arcane trivia: Towne was so disappointed with the final film that he stripped his name from the credits and used the moniker of his dog, P.H. Vazak, as a pseudonym.
The undisputed champ of contemporary wordless cinema, at least prior to The Artist, is Pixar’s astonishing animated feature Wall-E (2008), the post-apocalyptic story of a spunky little cleaning robot who finds love in a post-human wasteland when a female robot searching for signs of life stumbles into Wall-E’s ingenious palace of found-object treasures. It is a testament to the miraculous storytelling skills of the Pixar brain trust that virtually the entire movie eschews dialogue, and yet still conveys one of the most touching love stories in recent memory. It’s true the picture cheats slightly on its purely silent approach by having Wall-E repeat the name of his beloved lady robot, Eva, over and over again (“Eeee-vaaaa,” he croons), but since even classic silent movies used title cards to explain story points, there’s rarely ever been anything like truly wordless cinema.