Hugo: The Soul of Machines and the Magic of the Movies

Each of us brings a unique perspective to the world around us and to art and popular culture; our responses come from our loves, prejudices, varied understandings. For me, watching Hugo on my small television was a total delight; I saw it as an ode to the beauty of machines and the marvels of early cinema. My compelling interest in machinery as a painter made me alert to the visual grandeur of scenes inside the workings of giant clocks. They were mysterious and gorgeous and complex. Romance resides within the clockwork as it connects us to the human world of love, of business, of everyday life.

There is also the grand metaphor, God as a watchmaker, as from rom richly imagined hidden workings the scene sweeps to the world outside. But clocks, as all machines, have their negative impacts: they remind us of the crush of time in busy modern life. The machines I paint––which I find beautiful––make modern farming possible, but I am also aware of their dark side: the pollution of air, soil and water, and the damage to health.

We've had a long relationship with machines, from the beginnings of the industrial revolution to contemporary computing, yet I was awed by the automaton in this film. Its enigmatic face, reflective and calm, seems to hold deep secrets, with its touching human form adding a layer of nostalgia to its presence. I wonder if I would feel a similar longing when seeing a contemporary robot years hence; I doubt it. And then to see it work! It turns out that the complexity of the drawing it produced was not a complete fabrication of the filmmakers; I did some research and found this site from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia with photos and videos of an automaton by the Swiss 18th century mechanician Henri Maillardet, including images of the three poems and 4 drawings it could produce. This machine was the inspiration for the automaton in Brian Selznik's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, that in turn inspired Scorsese's film. I have to take my hat off to the filmmakers for their decision to make the head of the automaton metallic like a machine and less like the traditional doll; this oddly enough made the automaton seem very alive in the flickering light.

Light and movement and fanciful imagination were at the heart of another great theme of Hugo, the very early films of the French master Georges Mèliés. He had been a magician, and he brought that sensibility to his films, which were full of strange happenings; imagination and wonder were on full display, as in the above The Merry Frolics of Satan from 1906. The films were laboriously hand tinted to gorgeous effect and were technically inventive in other ways.

One of his best known works is A Trip to the Moon of 1909. The colored version, thought lost, was found in 1993. (Thanks so much to Youtube for having several of these films online; you can see them at the links.) I chose this scene from A Trip to the Moon because it seems to be a precursor to the contemporary Avatar, whose planet also had giant fungi. A mushroom lover myself, I'd enjoy being lost in a forest of enormous mushrooms, lichens, and mosses.

Another fantastical, but turning to horror, film is Le Papillon Fantastique (1909), as a butterfly becomes a rapacious spider. I think about how early this small films are and how clever the special effects considering what was available at the time. Scorsese, in Hugo, helps us understand how stunned people were by early cinema: watching a film of a train coming towards us we feel as the early viewers did, that it will horrifyingly emerge from the screen. It was all so marvelous and new. Is the use of 3-D an attempt to bring back some of that early magic? I have to admit that I haven't seen any contemporary 3-D film in a theater; all I have is a memory of sitting in a movie theater when I was a child wearing those red and green glasses. It was magical then, but it seems to be just another big special effect now. But in this enchanting movie I felt I was being escorted back to a time of awed innocence.