{"id":25179,"date":"2012-01-10T13:30:07","date_gmt":"2012-01-10T18:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=25179"},"modified":"2012-01-11T10:47:02","modified_gmt":"2012-01-11T15:47:02","slug":"twice-told-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/10\/twice-told-tales\/","title":{"rendered":"Twice-Told Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the holidays, I go to the movies. This year I saw two of the critically praised releases of the fall, The Artist<\/em> and Puss in Boots<\/em>. <\/strong>Both of these films have relatively simple narratives. In The Artist <\/em>a successful silent-film actor falls out of favor with the advent of the talkies, and a young actress with a crush on him passes him by on her way up the ladder of success. Puss in Boots <\/em>is a revisionist collage that steals recognizable characters from a variety of literary sources, principally the eponymous seventeenth-century fairy tale by Charles Perrault, and fuses them together. Both of these films cull elements from earlier films and familiar narratives\u2014and both succeed, in part, because of the joy of recognition we get when we see motifs from our collective imagination tweaked in new ways. But the most prominent aspects of each of these films are the technical approaches to their subjects. One is an old-school silent film, and the other uses cutting-edge computer animation, but technology is the star of both, albeit a star that is worked into the fabric of each movie so as not to overpower the performers. <\/p>\n

The Artist <\/em>is a taut, charming, well-told tale, but it is by no means a fresh tale. The young, aspiring actress and the experienced Hollywood man can be found in innumerable Hollywood novels and films: Mabel\u2019s Dramatic Career <\/em>(1913, directed by Mack Sennett and staring Fatty Arbuckle), My Strange Life <\/em>(book, 1915), Souls for Sale <\/em>(Rupert Hughes, Howard\u2019s uncle, wrote the book and <\/em>directed the film), A Star Is Born <\/em>(1937, 1954, 1976), and Horace McCoy\u2019s damning novel, They Shoot Horses, Don\u2019t They?<\/em>\u2014not to mention Singing in the Rain.<\/em> Usually, in these stories, the actress finds out that Hollywood is a shallow place and leaves, seeking something more wholesome back home in the Midwest, or she finds a prince among the Hollywood predators and, with the prince, professional success. In The Artist<\/em>, the trajectories of the characters follow the pattern from A Star Is Born<\/em>, but in The Artist<\/em>, tragedy is averted at the end by the loving actress, who helps the washed-up actor find a new approach to the film business that has left him behind.<\/p>\n

Why has he been left behind? Because, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard<\/em>, <\/em>he is a performer stuck in the past, when silent films were dominant. (The actor, George Valentine, reminds me of my grandfather, a surgeon and professor who was afraid to use the computerized card catalogue at the library.) Valentine\u2019s tragedy is that his audience has abandoned him for the wonders of new technology. The relatively warmhearted studio head\u2014studio heads, producers, and directors are depicted as heartless cheaters in most Hollywood fictions\u2014played by John Goodman easily dismisses Valentine from his position of prominence because audiences don\u2019t want what he is offering anymore. The irony of the film is that it uses the old-fashioned techniques of silent film to show that Valentine needs to get over his fear and pride and embrace new<\/em> technology. The idea that Valentine needs to adjust himself to the technology, rather than the technology adjusting to him, is the writing on the wall for every actor, technician, and participant in the film business.<\/p>\n

One of the many films out this year that has<\/em> embraced new technology is Puss in Boots<\/em>. It\u2019s a 3-D computer-animated film that uses all of its medium\u2019s potential to take the viewer to miraculous worlds and on adventures that couldn\u2019t be captured before, at least not in this way. It uses the Perrault tale but also cannibalizes the stories of Humpty Dumpty (though he is given a rather more dignified middle name, \u201cHumpty Alexander<\/em> Dumpty\u201d) and Jack and Jill, who here are turned into murderous villains. The Jack and the Beanstalk story is employed as the structuring legend to give the characters a challenge and reminded me of another version of the tale: in 1902, Edwin S. Porter made a Jack and the Beanstalk film that utilized cutting-edge technology\u2014double exposure, animation, trick photography\u2014he had learned from the films of Marie-Georges-Jean M\u00e9li\u00e8s (not coincidentally, a character in Scorsese\u2019s new film, Hugo<\/em>), whose special effects were so incredible that he was considered a magician. Because of the technology, Porter\u2019s film gave audiences a new kind of experience and breathed new life in a hundred-year-old story. This is exactly what has happened with Puss in Boots <\/em>and The Artist <\/em>(although The Artist <\/em>achieves the same result with the process in reverse: remaking a traditional story with old <\/em>techniques). In both, well-worn stories are given a new gloss because of the technology involved. You could say that Avatar <\/em>and James Cameron are now the cinematic game changers that M\u00e9li\u00e8s and his Rocket to the Moon<\/em> (1902) once were.<\/p>\n

But as an actor, I ask, just as The Artist <\/em>asks, What happens to the performers when the technology advances? Puss in Boots <\/em>is an adequate answer to the question posed by The Artist<\/em>: <\/em>performers are subsumed by the technology. The Artist <\/em>is a film about an actor who can\u2019t use his voice in film\u2014and Puss in Boots <\/em>is an animated film that uses only <\/em>famous performers\u2019 voices (Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Zach Galifianakis, Billy Bob Thornton, Amy Sedaris). Animation has been a part of film history almost since its inception, and animation with<\/em> sound started at almost the same time as live-action talkies, Snow White<\/em> being one of the first feature-length animated sound films in 1937. But it wasn\u2019t until Aladdin <\/em>(1992) and then Toy Story <\/em>(1995) that recognizable actors started voicing animated characters with regularity. The personalities of the performers is now a huge part of the animation process, and as computer-generated technology advances, the images will only begin to look more lifelike. Pretty soon\u2014in fact it\u2019s already happening, just look at Tintin<\/em>\u2014it won\u2019t just be the voices that actors provide for CG animators; it will be all the aspects of a performance. Maybe in a hundred years someone will make a sequel to The Artist<\/em>, which will be shot in a retro style with live-action actors, and which will tell the tale of what happened to an actor who didn\u2019t want to transition into the CG-heavy films of the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the holidays, I go to the movies. This year I saw two of the critically praised releases of the fall, The Artist and Puss in Boots. Both of these films have relatively simple narratives. In The Artist a successful silent-film actor falls out of favor with the advent of the talkies, and a young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":236,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1186],"tags":[5535,5551,5547,5552,5534,5546,5545,5540,5542,5543,5539,5531,5544,5541,5533,5538,5529,5536,5532,5537,5530,4404,4451,5550,5549],"class_list":["post-25179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-film","tag-a-star-is-born","tag-aladdin","tag-antonio-banderas","tag-charles-perrault","tag-dont-they","tag-edwin-s-porter","tag-hugo","tag-humpty-dumpty","tag-jack-and-jill","tag-jack-and-the-beanstalk","tag-john-goodman","tag-mabels-dramatic-career","tag-marie-georges-jean-melies","tag-mother-goose","tag-my-strange-life","tag-norma-desmond","tag-puss-in-boots","tag-singin-in-the-rain","tag-souls-for-sale","tag-sunset-boulevard","tag-the-artist","tag-they-shoot-horses","tag-tintin","tag-toy-story","tag-zach-galifianakis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTwice-Told Tales by James Franco<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 10, 2012 \u2013 Over the holidays, I go to the movies. 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