Hugo (2011)

"Stuff your eyes with wonder. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” - Ray Bradbury

Released during the Silent Film Awareness Renaissance of 2011 (when The Artist won Best Picture, remember), Hugo was a film that took many people by surprise and is a tribute to the life and work of Georges Méliès. But how accurate this movie can be? The basic details are true. Méliès career really did go downhill during WWI, he really did burn many of his remaining sets and props, and he did end up selling toys in the Montparnasse train station. Just in case anyone arguing this is a classic ode to early films. A funny thing Johnny Depp was a producer but he was too busy making another movie so his contribution was small.

In its evolution, cinema has periodically experienced dramatic stages that have influenced its development, producing spectacular changes in orientation and devastating value reversals. The transition from silent film to sound, from black-and-white film to color, the change in the filming rate from 16-18 to 24 frames per second, the transition from the reduced format to widescreen projection and then to panoramic film with 70mm film, stereophonic sound, then with eight channels, then with 52...digital cinema...All of these moments had major consequences and severely affected the course of the history of the seventh art, as well as the lives of those involved in the film industry. In Hugo, Martin Scorsese's logic is very simple: by increasingly asserting 3D film, we find ourselves at one of these turning points.

At the dawn of a new beginning and in a festive manner, it is an honor to commemorate the pioneers of those days when the film was just being born; and in which, its promoters, very little accustomed to change, experienced infinitely more intensely the discoveries of the era and the trials imposed by them. In a few words, the film is a generous tribute to the personality of Georges Melier, an undisputed artisan of the concept of cinema spectacle and a legitimate parent, along with the Lumiere brothers, of the world cinema.

It is a great mystery, but also a huge surprise (pleasant to ecstasy) to realize that the glove of such a necessary and obligatory challenge was raised precisely by Martin Scorsese, an author who has accustomed us to a completely different type of film and a completely different attitude on the set. Perhaps from this intriguing non-correlation, the sympathy (almost unanimous) of the critics for Hugo was born, a film made mostly in 3D format, as many other productions belonging to directors specializing in this technique only add the respective effects, much more conveniently, in the post-production phase.

I won't say anything about the plot. It's a fairy tale, so... Fairy tales cannot be succinctly related: they are told...intoned. And the story of Hugo is best told by the film that I invite you to see...must be in a 3D cinema. I also draw your attention to the metaphors used by the director, which contain allusive references to many of Melier and Lumiere's short films, and to the charming allegorical parallel between mechanics, mechanisms, kinematics, and cinematography.

The story of the automaton (robot/clock) both as a concept (a complicated clockwork mechanism that can write; ultimately reproducing a purely spiritual human activity) and as its evolution in the narrative (it is lost, destroyed, reconstructed, reactivated in turn), represents an impressive parable that stems from the phrase proposed by Henri Bergson in The Laughter "Du mecanique plaque sur du vivant..." which identifies a precise and distinct mechanism in any phenomenon or creation that causes laughter.