"This is the problem with language, and this is what makes silent movies fun, because the connection with them, me or the audience is not with the language. There's no question of interpretation of what we are saying it's just about feeling. You create your own story"
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Hazanavicius is quietly dunking on the most overrated special effect in cinema: dialogue. His point isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-mistrust. Language, he implies, arrives preloaded with friction - accents, idioms, timing, subtext that can misfire across cultures or even across moods. Words are supposed to clarify, yet they’re also where audiences start litigating meaning: Did she mean that? Was that ironic? Are we being manipulated?
Silent film, in his framing, bypasses that courtroom. It’s “fun” not because it’s quaint, but because it restores a purer contract between screen and viewer: image, rhythm, gesture, music. Instead of decoding lines, you’re reading faces and cuts. The “no question of interpretation” claim is deliberately provocative - of course images are interpretable - but he’s aiming at a different kind of interpretation: less semantic, more bodily. You don’t parse; you respond.
The subtext is a defense of cinema as its own language, one that doesn’t need to borrow legitimacy from literature or theater. Coming from Hazanavicius, the context is hard to miss: The Artist and its nostalgia for a pre-talkie era aren’t just aesthetic cosplay, they’re an argument about accessibility. Silent movies travel. They ask the audience to co-author, to “create your own story,” which is also a sly admission of risk: remove words and you lose control. He’s betting that surrendering control is where the magic lives.
Silent film, in his framing, bypasses that courtroom. It’s “fun” not because it’s quaint, but because it restores a purer contract between screen and viewer: image, rhythm, gesture, music. Instead of decoding lines, you’re reading faces and cuts. The “no question of interpretation” claim is deliberately provocative - of course images are interpretable - but he’s aiming at a different kind of interpretation: less semantic, more bodily. You don’t parse; you respond.
The subtext is a defense of cinema as its own language, one that doesn’t need to borrow legitimacy from literature or theater. Coming from Hazanavicius, the context is hard to miss: The Artist and its nostalgia for a pre-talkie era aren’t just aesthetic cosplay, they’re an argument about accessibility. Silent movies travel. They ask the audience to co-author, to “create your own story,” which is also a sly admission of risk: remove words and you lose control. He’s betting that surrendering control is where the magic lives.
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