It's all magic.By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
"As if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen . . ." T.S. Eliot
Georges Melies for many movie buffs represents the love affair with imaginative filmmaking at its earliest. Inspired by the Lumiere brothers' short film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1897), Melies went on in the early years of the 20th century to create such flights of fancy as A Trip to the Moon (1902) with a rocket ship hitting the eye of the Man in the Moon.
Martin Scorsese loves movies and their celluloid preservation, so Hugo is no surprise as a fantasy of an early '30's orphan living in the walls of a French train station restoring an automaton invented by Melies (Sir Ben Kingsley), who now owns a toy store in the station. Young Hugo (Asa Butterfiled) and his friend Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) adventure into the world of artifice and romance called movies.
In the discovery of Melies' extant footage, Scorsese makes a strong case for preservation of the old combustible celluloid, a lifelong crusade of his. Yet the heart of the film is the boy's emerging love of cinema, like Scorsese's, reminiscent of Cinema Paradiso and Super 8. I think of Woody Allen's reverie about the '20's, Midnight in Paris, for the nostalgic recreation of a romantic era in the arts. For both auteurs, movies are an artistic expression and a way to meet the past.
Although Scorsese uses ample CGI and 3-D, the opening alone is a marvel of swooping in on the train, its station, digital crowds, and ultimately the hidden boy, like our secret selves descending on a movie set. It reminds me of Mike Nichols' opening sequence to Working Girl, where his camera flies down like a god into the Staten Island ferry. In this case Scorsese uses 3-D in a way I have rarely seen?the right way. It's all magical.
Melies began as a magician, and Hugo's father made a living in his shop for mechanical wonderments, both no doubt a paean to special effects. It's how modern Martin continues the fantasy by smoothly creating another world, as he did in The Age of Innocence, this time a world he knows intimately: the paradise of cinema.
John DeSando co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain