"I always loved silent movies. I was not a specialist, but I loved them. And when I started directing, I became really fascinated by the format - how it works, the device of the silent movie. It's not the same form of expression as a talkie. The lack of sounds makes you participate in the storytelling"
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Hazanavicius is pitching silence as a technology, not a nostalgia trip. Coming from a contemporary director best known for pastiche (The Artist), he frames silent cinema less like a museum piece and more like a different operating system for storytelling. The key move is his insistence that he was "not a specialist" but "loved them" anyway: a quiet rebuke to gatekeeping, and a claim of emotional permission. You do not need a PhD in film history to feel what this form does to you.
When he calls silence a "device", he strips it of sacredness and treats it like craft. That word matters. It suggests silent film isn't an inferior precursor to the talkie; it's a deliberate constraint that generates its own effects. In talkies, sound can do the heavy lifting: explanation, mood cues, authority. Remove it and the image suddenly has to negotiate meaning in public. Faces, gestures, cuts, and rhythm stop being decoration and start being argument.
"The lack of sounds makes you participate" is the real thesis, and it lands because it's slightly accusatory. Participation isn't passive appreciation; it's labor. Silence forces viewers to project voice, intention, even interiority onto bodies on screen. You supply connective tissue: what a look "means", what a pause "says", how a chase "feels". Hazanavicius is defending an older form by rebranding it as interactive, a precursor to the very viewer engagement contemporary culture claims to crave. In a media landscape saturated with explanation and noise, he’s making a case that omission can be the most modern gesture of all.
When he calls silence a "device", he strips it of sacredness and treats it like craft. That word matters. It suggests silent film isn't an inferior precursor to the talkie; it's a deliberate constraint that generates its own effects. In talkies, sound can do the heavy lifting: explanation, mood cues, authority. Remove it and the image suddenly has to negotiate meaning in public. Faces, gestures, cuts, and rhythm stop being decoration and start being argument.
"The lack of sounds makes you participate" is the real thesis, and it lands because it's slightly accusatory. Participation isn't passive appreciation; it's labor. Silence forces viewers to project voice, intention, even interiority onto bodies on screen. You supply connective tissue: what a look "means", what a pause "says", how a chase "feels". Hazanavicius is defending an older form by rebranding it as interactive, a precursor to the very viewer engagement contemporary culture claims to crave. In a media landscape saturated with explanation and noise, he’s making a case that omission can be the most modern gesture of all.
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