Without Méliès, our cinematic world would be very different; he was a genius, a visionary and an artist. Hugo celebrates his life, artistry and vision through a fantastical clockwork world that he would have approved of.
Based on the novel ‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’ by Brian Selznick, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is a technical marvel and a love letter to cinema’s birth. Set amidst the hustle and bustle of Paris’ Montparnasse train station in the early 1930s, a young orphan, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), lives in the station’s clock tower, repairing and maintaining the clocks.
Hugo lost his mother at a young age and then his clockmaker father (Jude Law) in a dreadful fire, and now lives alone, hiding in the train station’s walls and avoiding the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). As Hugo attempts to repair an automaton his father was working on before his death, he steals parts from a shopkeeper who sells mechanical toys and magic tricks.
However, unknown to Hugo, the shopkeeper is the legendary film director Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) – a man whose groundbreaking films are all but forgotten following the horrors of World War I. But when his goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), and Hugo become friends, they set out to celebrate the work Georges has kept locked away.
For those unfamiliar, here’s a brief overview of Georges Méliès and his place in film history. Many will be familiar with the 1902 silent film “A Trip to the Moon”; in it, a rocket crashes into the moon’s face, and we then witness a group of explorers walking onto its surface. Directed by Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon remains one of the earliest examples of special effects and fantasy in film. Long before The Wizard of Oz brought Technicolour to our screens, A Trip to the Moon was painstakingly hand-coloured, making it the second colour film ever made, following Le Château hanté, also directed by Méliès.
To say Georges Méliès was one of the fathers of modern cinema is an understatement; after all, many of the effects we now take for granted were created by him. Here, Méliès invented the split screen, stop-motion, and jump cut, taking us from the Lumière Brothers’ love of real life to the fantastical, magical world cinema would later embrace. Méliès brought his skills as a theatre magician to the screen and, in turn, changed cinema forever.
However, most of his work was destroyed after the First World War, and by 1925, Méliès was penniless, running a small toy booth at the Paris Montparnasse train station. But history has been kinder, and Méliès has rightly regained his crown as a true pioneer of early cinema. Without Méliès, our cinematic world would be very different; he was a genius, a visionary and an artist.
Hugo celebrates his life, artistry and vision through a fantastic clockwork world that also embraces a new world: Digital 3D, and remains one of the best examples of this format, years later. But it’s the heart, warmth and joy of Hugo that Méliès would undoubtedly have approved of, as Scorsese celebrates film and the filmmakers who make our dreams a reality.
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