Silence Please !

Not long ago on a cold winter evening I was reclining in a bucket seat in the center of a mid-sized theatre watching a movie, silently! I had switched off my cellphone; less out of courtesy towards the 5 other occupants in the 100-seat hall and more out to my inability to spend brain-cycles exploring the smartness of my smart-phone while somewhere behind a pigeon-hole a 35mm reel kept rolling. So there I was, watching the underdog of underdogs, a silent, black and white movie produced three years after the juggernaut-genre of Avatar threatened to obliterate 21st century talkies!

It will not be a surprise if this movie title enters the English lexicon as a synonym for the word "anachronism". Imagine a director sitting amidst a cornucopia of technology so advanced that he barely needs humans to act, move or talk to make a movie. Then he sweeps away all that off his table and starts drawing silhouettes on his paper-pad and eventually makes a movie out of them. Just the idea of loving something that contemporary society terms outdated or extinct is not so uncommon. What is is the determination to give vent to the idea and put it up on a movie screen for the whole world to gape at and ignore, ridicule, and eventually acknowledge as extraordinary. The Artist is an example of just that, and more.

Ever wondered how difficult it might be to convey a story to the viewer in a silent movie(cannot call them the audience, since there is no audio)? Especially, to the blockbuster Bollywood crowd whose senses are lulled by the most uncomplicated of plots being spoon-fed through oversimplified and often redundant dialogues. Throughout this movie I realized something I had always known but had never felt before. When one of your sense organs become useless, the others strive to compensate to provide you the optimal experience. That is why a blind man has a sharper sense of smell and hearing while a deaf man's visual and nasal senses are more acute than those of an average being. This movie had some remarkable moments of suspense (Yes, without any nerve-wrecking sound track to warn viewers of an impending moment of importance) portrayed just through the facial expressions of the characters, background shots and simple camera movements. In one such moment, the director portrays the anxiety of a troubled mind through the constant barking of a dog as its master stands still holding a revolver to his mouth. Off course you don't hear the dog bark! You just see it barking. And then you see a screen that says... BANG! And what do you think happened? Yes, right; outside a vintage Rolls Royce had at the most opportune moment veered away from the road and crashed into a tree on the pavement. Again, you dint hear the "BANG"! You just saw it on your screen. The man puts his gun down and simply walks away with a smile(or was it a smirk at the viewer's expense?). You see, just the visual was enough to titillate the senses that one thought could not be awakened by a silent B/W movie in an era of 3D.

The plot of the movie is not indigenous and comes roughly out of the Sunset Boulevard story line. Here a silent movie mega-star is struggling among small fish to come to terms with the "talkies" and is severely handicapped by a bruised yet unbroken ego. Sort of like sinking the Bismark if you can imagine a battleship with human emotions! What sets the movie apart though is the last screenshot, where ironically the viewer hears two words coming out of the protagonist's mouth. Those two words stretch the 1.5 hour movie by as much, since the viewer now has to revisit the entire movie in a new perspective. How cool is that for a dumb show?

This post though isn't about exhorting the readers to go back in time and watch silent movies. There is a certain class of people who get their thrill watching Buster Keaton's General or Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. They do not need any impetus. The rest I cannot influence with my rant here. The point here is the value of ones interests to oneself and the importance of pursuing that(those) interest(s) however anachronistic they may seem. If the above movie (which I am sure at its inception would have been a laughable concept) can become a reality, then why cannot we lesser mortals pursue the little dreams that as children we may have dared to dream?

Why can't a girl roller skate just because the community thinks that wheels are only for cars? Why can't she sing aloud anymore just because she's married now and singing has served its purpose already? Why can't history be a thing to like and photography be an optional course in schools? Why does one have to be an engineer first and then anyone else? Why does one have to have the same goals, aims, ambitions like the rest. A job, a spouse, a house, a kid, another job, another house, and a brain that eventually does not know what to do with any of those, including itself! Why does one not stop and think, for once?

As I silently scream words in this post and vent my ire at the keyboard, my wife sits in one corner of the drawing room softly humming the following lines... jodi tor daak shune keu na aashe tobe ekla cholo re advocating her new found love for the Bengali language. Maybe, in those lines lie the answer to my questions.

Note: This is NOT a review of the movie, The Artist, and I have referenced it only to drive to a certain point. It however will not be a waste of time if you watch it, to the end!