Marcel Marceau, king of pantomime

One hundred years ago, Marcel Marceau, the most famous of French mimes, was born. An extraordinary life recounted by The Art of Silence, directed by Maurizius Staerkle Drux in a documentary film linking his own experience as the son of a mime to the turbulent history of Marcel Marceau.

The Art of Silence returns to the tragic origin of the work of mime, which has remained unrecognized for a long time. The documentary gives a glimpse of the first thirty years of a son of Polish Jewish immigrants, born Marcel Mangel, marked by the rise of anti-Semitism in France. During the Second World War, the young man, then only 19 years old, joined the Resistance within the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) and took the pseudonym “Marceau”.

An intimate portrait of Marcel Marceau

Aged 108, Georges Loinger, cousin of Marcel Marceau, gives a moving testimony on this subject by telling how, together, they helped hundreds of Jewish children to escape deportation. A fate which his father did not escape, who died in Auschwitz in 1944.

Those close to him paint a sensitive portrait of the “king of pantomime”. Each in their own way, they perpetuate the artistic heritage left by the artist. Rob Mermin, a student of Marceau, today uses pantomime with people with motor impairments, while the Marceau family is filmed creating a piece in honor of the mime Marceau.

But the documentary does not content itself with painting a classic portrait of mime. On the contrary, the director takes a fresh and contemporary look at what “the art of silence” means. He draws on his personal experience by filming his father, Christoph Staerkle, who, suffering from deafness, found his own form of expression in the art of mime. The film thus reveals the wealth there is in freeing the language of words and giving gestures their full expressive charge.

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