There is a new movie out this season, the time of year when the very best movies are released, to vie for the Top 10 or 15 titles. I’ve seen a few of these, Moneyball and Ides of March. One of the new ones is a cinematographic treat, Hugo, based on a 2008 book by Brian Selznick, who mostly illustrates. It has a big star cast, is long, is not animated, in English, set in Paris in the 30’s at the cavernous train station. The child star was well selected, as was the rest of the cast. Spoiler Alert! It is now necessary to discuss some essential parts of the movie to show why it’s relevant to a Builder’s thread!
The movie is about a boy who lives within the walls of the station, and it’s a mystery as to how and why, but he seems to be preoccupied by the station’s huge clocks, from an insiders perspective. He has been deprived of an education so he must learn by stealing books from a bookstore and the same goes for food and ‘spare parts’. It seems his father was a watchmaker and Hugo inherited from him a most interesting device: an automaton, similar to mechanical fortune tellers at carnivals and boardwalks, but much more advanced. So now you finally see why I decided to include this within the Builder’s thread. The automaton’s details are exquisitely drawn out in a booklet and lovingly restored by the watchmaker and his son, Hugo. When the booklet is revealed, it is in the hands of a former movie maker who flips thru it: there are about 100 pictures of the automaton, one on each page, all slightly different, superimposable, and flipping thru 100 pages causes the appearance of motion. This is one of the secrets of the movie, and I shalln’t reveal it.
This new movie’s relation to our Wall-E is glaring. A two dimensional world, in a series of pictures, can form a movie and this suggests a real three-dimensional creation. What is fantastic here, is that the creation is more than pictures in a laboratory notebook, and it can draw, and it can draw pictures that could be used in a movie. Of course, the automaton has no creative abilities, it draws only what it has been programmed to draw: from a vertebral-like column of metal instructional plates or disks. What it draws is a step to revealing the movie’s secret. There is nothing untrue in this fantasy film, it could all be real; it’s a magical movie that doesn’t use magic.
Another ‘device’ used in this movie was a very slow start to the automaton’s drawing. Intriguing. The influence for this might have been the famous chess-playing automaton/computer from the early 1800’s, destroyed in a fire in Philadelphia decades later. This device, which was a fake, started out very ponderously surveying the chess board, and then boldly made its first move, causing ladies amongst the spectators to gasp. It should not escape your notice, is that when clocks (this movie is big on clocks, big clocks!) were first invented 1000 years ago*, people thought “Oh, how complicated, that must be how our bodies work, in some way”. Thus, the introduction of an automaton into this book is no accident…
The automaton needs to be fixed by the watchmaker. It is not the only thing broken in this movie. The station policeman is partly mechanical and he is broken. Poor little Hugo comes from a broken family. The character played by Ben Kingsley is in need of repair.
There are many references to famous literary and movie figures of that era. One of them is Hal Roach himself, who has been associated here with Wall-E’s roach. There is a poster outside a movie theater with his name on it. And there is even a mechanical mouse! Did I mention that this was Paris? Alas, there are tasty croissants, but no mechanical mouse chefs…
*mechanical clocks, which grew more and more complicated; before these there were sundials and water flow clocks, as early as 4000 BC.
