Hugo
Directed By: Martin
Scorsese
Written By: John
Logan, based on the book The Invention of
Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Starring: Asa
Butterfield, Chloe Grace Mortez, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Ray Winstone,
Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee, Helen McCrory, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jude Law
Director of Photographer: Robert Richardson, Editor: Thelma
Schoonmaker, Production Designer: Dante Ferretti, Original Music: Howard Shore
Rated: PG
In
1989, film history Tom Gunning wrote a highly influential essay entitled “The
Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Mr.
Gunning examined how film historians had written about the early yore of silent
cinema and its push toward narrative cinema. But he proposed that the
attraction of the works of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers was not based
on seeing stories, but seeing things move. The cinema itself, the spectacle of
movement, was its primary attraction. Stories came later; cinema was born out
of this attraction of the possibilities of cinema could show or do anything we
could think up.
It
is this love of spectacle that has obviously drawn Martin Scorsese to make one
of his most ambitious, pictures of his career and one of his most
self-conscious films. Hugo, an
adaptation of a young adult novel by Brian Selznick looks like a strange
departure for a director as it follows a story of a child in somewhat of a
fairy tale. But Hugo is much more
than that, a bold, genre-crossing picture that is both narrative and spectacle,
and ultimately a film essay on the importance of the origins of cinema, and the
need to preserve classic film as well.
