'The Artist' empowers filmmakers

It's been a long time coming, but the highly acclaimed French film "The Artist" finally opens locally today. And if you don't know already, it's silent. And in that squareish screen ratio that was used through the 1940s (and for TV shows until the late 1990s).

And — wait for it — it's in black and white!

To some of you, that may seem like a warning: Uh, oh. Look out. This one uses music instead of audio dialogue and it isn't widescreen and it's not in color! Oh, the horror.

But actually, all of this is meant to be encouraging. A silent movie in the old image format and it's in black and white? I'm there.

Silent movies are almost non-existent today, although every once in awhile someone experiments with the pantomime/intertitles style, usually a director from foreign soil, as with Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki's "Juha" (1999) and Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer's "Dr. Plonk" (2007).

But before "The Artist," American audiences hadn't seen a widely released homage to this antiquated style of moviemaking since Mel Brooks' all-star "Silent Movie" in 1976. And even that one wasn't 100 percent dialogue-free. Like "The Artist," "Silent Movie" has one spoken line (from, of all people, the world's most famous mime, Marcel Marceau).

And that old-fashioned, not-quite-square, big-screen image is almost never used for theatrical movies today — although we did have a wide-release film in the format last year, the artsy, low-key pioneer western, "Meek's Cutoff."

Black-and-white cinematography has occasionally been used since color took over some 50 years ago but less and less with each decade. Partly because it became more expensive for major studios than color and partly because distributors began to believe it would keep the audience away.

Today, of course, it would be easy peasy; the push of a button, the toggle of a mouse — voila! Monochrome!

Personally, I love black and white but it seems to be universally vilified today. Some modern teen and 20something moviegoers often express the opinion that musicals are ridiculous and westerns are boring (nothing like a broad generalization to start an argument) — but with few exceptions, they all seem to hate black and white.