Hugo (2011) (with Eric Smoodin)

Chris and Alex dust off their knowledge of early film history for Episode 55 as they examine Martin Scorsese’s adventure Hugo (2011), a playful mystery set in 1930s Paris that takes audiences through the special effects and spectacular stagecraft of pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès. Joining Chris and Alex amid the architecture of the Gare Montparnasse is Eric Smoodin, Professor of American Studies and Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, who has published monographs and edited collections on Walt Disney, Frank Capra and Hollywood film history, as well as a new book Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950 (Duke University Press, 2020) that sketches a picture of French film culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Listen as they situate Hugo within the history of cine-clubs, cinéphile subcultures and local exhibition practices of early twentieth-century Paris; the significance of Méliès as a filmmaker within the entwined genealogies of fantasy and animation; the pleasures of digital artificiality and VFX fakery in Scorsese’s historical depiction of the French capital; the intertextual invitations made by the film to the spectatorial experience; the interrelationship between cinema as a machine, animation, and the automaton; and how Hugo offers a lavish - if highly imagined and typically conservative - 3D vision of early filmgoing as a powerful unifying force.