![]() It is no coincidence that a film dealing with the origins of cinema should unfold in such a location, since associations between trains and cinema have existed since the invention of this technological and artistic medium. Hugo automaton movie#Trains and cinema are thus presented as two inventions symbolizing modernity, marked by a degree of mistrust, as posing a threat, even when they remain associated with the fascinating notion of movement, and the idea of assembling people as a temporary community within the bounds of a movie theatre.Ī train journey into the history of cinemaĮxcept for a few scenes set in Geroges Méliès’s apartment in Paris and in the “Film Academy Library” – a large, fictitious hall full of books on the cinema – Hugo is mainly set in a vast train station. This journey into the past seems to imply that both trains and the art of illusion called “cinema” are instrumental in defining the notion of time. Hugo takes viewers to Paris in the early 1930s, and to even earlier periods: the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries when Georges Méliès was working on some of his first feature films, such as Le Manoir du diable ( Manor of the Devil, 1896), Cendrillon ( Cinderella, 1899) and Le Mélodrame ( The Melomaniac,1903). Moreover, movement is associated with the idea of a journey – as if cinema could be conceived as a mental form of travelling, not merely in space, but also in time. The impression of movement for the movie audience is bolstered by the innumerable images of machine parts (automata, clocks, wind-up toys, etc.), whose motion seems synonymous with life, an attribute applied here to both people and automata. Even if no trains are shown leaving the station (except for one during a short, deliberately burlesque sequence), the notion of movement inherent to both trains and cinema remains of central importance, and it is therefore interesting to question the different values and meanings that trains are endowed with in Hugo. The adventure leads the two children and the audience to the origins of cinema and its magical beginnings, a dimension which has never vanished from Scorsese’s movies.īy having a train station as the main setting for Hugo, Scorsese reinforces the correlation between trains and cinema. He is in fact Georges Méliès (1861-1938), the great illusionist and one of the first French film directors. ![]() The quest for this key provides the starting point for the enthralling adventure during which Hugo is helped by Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), an eccentric, bookish young girl, who grew up with Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), a sour-tempered toy-shop owner. Despite his skill at fixing gadgets, wind-up toys, clocks and watches, the parentless boy cannot repair the mechanical man without a key. Hugo spends his days maintaining and winding up the station clock, observing its countless passengers, a café owner, florist, newspaper vendor, inspector and a curiously familiar, yet bitter, toy-booth owner, while striving to repair a mysterious, broken automaton – a mechanical man intimately associated with his dead father, Archibald Cabret (Jude Law), killed in a museum fire. Brimming with allusions to films from 1895 to the 1930s, the time of the action, and scattered with references to later films, Hugo is in many ways a journey through the history of cinema.īased on Brian Selznick’s 2007 novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the drawings of which seem inspired by silent movies, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo relates the story of the young orphan of the title (Asa Butterfield), who leads a solitary life within the walls of one of the busiest railway stations of Paris, the Gare Montparnasse. Yet Hugo could be read as an expression of Scorsese’s homage to old masterpieces, or as a wish to transmit his fascination for the cinematic art. It may seem somewhat puzzling to discover Martin Scorsese directing a Christmas fantasy comedy-drama – a tradition inaugurated with It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) – since he is better known for gangster movies such as Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990). ![]() ![]() ![]() Trains and Cinema: Life and Movement in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) ![]()
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