The Artist (2011)
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius
Hollywood, 1927: As silent movie star George Valentin wonders if the arrival of talking pictures will cause him to fade into oblivion, he sparks with Peppy Miller, a young dancer set for a big break.
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This is demonstrated in the film's opening scene, set in a "movie palace" during a packed Hollywood premiere in 1927, the year sound cinema demonstrated its potency with "The Jazz Singer."
More than 80 years after "The Jazz Singer" popularized sound, a few purists still maintain that black-and-white silent movies were superior to Technicolor talkies, but no one since Chaplin has made the case more effectively than French director Michel Hazanavicius in his delightful tribute "The Artist."
Sunrise was released in the same year as the famed The Jazz Singer, the first film to popularly use recorded voices.
As Al Jolson sing "My Mammy" for the end of "The Jazz Singer," sound is rapidly developing into the expected norm for audiences everywhere.
As they amp up the voltage on machinery that looks borrowed from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," they command the prisoner to break his silence.
It's not entirely unlike Joe Johnston's subversively great The Wolfman , which, in a similar way, essays the corniness and nigh unwatchability of the secondary stable of Universal Monsters by being completely, artfully, jubilantly ridiculous.