The Paradox of ‘The Artist’
A nod from the Oscars is a sure shot ticket for any film to achieve celluloid immortality and this year the big winner is the unassuming film ‘The Artist’, a well deserved winner grabbing the coveted Best Picture, Best Director and the Best Actor awards along with a few other awards. Not able to contain my excitement I managed to catch the film playing on a big screen nearby. Not a single word was spoken in the movie yet by the time I came out of the auditorium a thousand words filled my mind. Interestingly, the storyline of the movie can be summed up in one line; in fact it can fit into one tweet of less than 140 characters. I doubt if any other movie in recent times has such a simple story. ‘A superstar of the silent film era fades away from public memory as the advent of talkies makes him redundant.’ This one line story set in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s has a theme that keeps recurring throughout human history, especially relevant to us in current t