1/10/2024 0 Comments Automaton hugo![]() On a broader level, Hugo’s premise, in which a boy discovers, and eventually rescues, the marvelous films of cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, offers a quasi-historical account of the first few decades of the medium. In an unexpectedly thrilling sequence where Hugo and Isabelle browse through a film history book, images from Edison’s The Kiss, Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, and Griffith’s Intolerance come to life onscreen, and faces of bygone stars appear as if in an Academy Awards tribute montage. Like Selznick’s book, a graphic novel with numerous film stills, Hugo is replete with references to early movies, particularly in its second half. But the film goes further than any other in its cinephilic fervor. In 1990 he established the Film Foundation, which supports film restoration, and later founded its international program, The World Cinema Project.) Scenes of characters watching movies have long been staples in his work (most memorably Travis Bickle’s botched date at a porn cinema in Taxi Driver and Max Cady’s maniacal laughter during Problem Child in Cape Fear), and Hugo adds to this with the wide-eyed wonderment of Hugo (Asa Butterfield) and the plucky Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) as they gaze at Lloyd’s daredevil stunt during a screening. (In other ways, of course, Scorsese is incredibly active in preserving film. Hugo is Scorsese’s most overt work of cinephilia, at least in terms of fictional filmmaking. While Hugo is certainly suitable for kids, the one child with whom it was made in mind was clearly a youthful version of Scorsese, entranced for the first time with the magic of the movies. Yet the poster’s image of a boy dangling from the arm of a clock tower revealed just how much of a Scorsese picture it really was: movie lovers easily recognized the boy’s feat as an homage to the iconic shot from Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last. ![]() Based on Brian Selznick’s best-selling children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it is his only children’s movie, and it lacks even the slightest hint of his trademark grit. Hugo seems the least Scorsese-like of the director’s films. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo surveys cinema from this postcinematic station, returning to the profound connection between childhood wonder and early cinema. The death of cinema has been heralded countless times over the past several decades, suggesting that we are well into its ghostly afterlife. However, the automaton – 15 of them were built for the film, each one executing a different move or function – is a genuine inspiration for practical-minded entrepreneurs who want their companies to fulfill both self-expressive and financial goals.Film history is often conceived according to a developmental model: the earliest films are regarded as the medium’s infancy, the transitional years of the teens and twenties serving as its adolescence, and its maturity only reached in the golden age of the thirties and beyond. Yes, Scorsese suffuses Hugo with the notion that the art of movie-making is a magical dream-engendering vocation. These are also nice qualities for businesses to brag about. Needless to say, the boy’s persistence and love pay off, and the automaton goes well beyond the call of duty by connecting the past to present, generating new relationships providing direction, and fueling hope. ![]() In the film, which is based on Brian Selznick’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) tries to complete the repair process on the automaton, which is the only thing he has that connects him to his recently deceased father. In our case, because it’s a computer program, it can draw absolutely anything.” ![]() Historically, the clockwork mechanisms of these automatons allowed for information – concerning the manual tasks that these entities would perform – “to be programmed in, letter by letter, so the amount that it could actually write or draw was quite limited. ![]()
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