Facets' College Corner: Hommage à Georges Méliès

This week in College Corner, student Diana Kopecky of Oakton Community College writes about Hugo, Martin Scorsese's valentine to George Méliès and the value of film preservation. After studying Méliès in an introductory film class, Diana found the experience of watching Scorsese's movie very rewarding.

Hugo is literally an hommage to George Méliès and the history of film. Within the first three scenes of Hugo, I counted two instances in which director Martin Scorsese used refined versions of techniques attributed to Méliès. The first was the use of a fade, where a clock fades into the city of Paris. The second was the use of something like multiple exposures or superimposition to reflect a clock perfectly in an old man’s eye.

Cinderella

            Even the importance of clocks in this film can be taken as a reference to George Méliès’ interpretation of Cinderella, where the abundant use of his pop-on/pop-off trick tells us that Cinderella is out of time at the ball. It’s actually quite amazing how much  I was able to glean from Hugo just by spending a half hour looking up George Méliès online. It made my interaction with the movie more personal, almost like a game of hide and seek.

            It also helped me predict outcomes. For example, as soon as I saw the clock reflected in the old man’s eye, I knew he must be George Méliès. But instead of having this knowledge and being bored by it, I was on the edge of my seat, bursting to tell Hugo and Isabelle who Papa George really was. This knowledge had me waiting in anticipation: How would they discover just how great this “toy-maker” really was?

            Surprisingly, the movie depicts Méliès with relative historical correctness. The major departure from Méliès’s life story is his involvement with the fictional Hugo, and the role Hugo plays in his rediscovery. In real life, Méliès  actually was a magician with his own theatre. After watching L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (The Train Arrives at the Station) by the Lumiere Brothers, he decided to become a filmmaker. He sold his theatre and built a glass structure to film his movies with optimum lighting from the sun. He made over 500 films, and he was very successful in his day. But after WWI, people lost interest in his fantasy movies, and he fell to ruin. Most of his 500 films were destroyed; many melted down and turned into shoe heels. He did become a toy-maker in a train station. He was also finally rediscovered and honored for his contribution to film in 1931 with the Legion of Honor Award.

            In depicting the ups and downs of George Méliès’ life as a filmmaker, Hugo is able to convey the importance of the history of film to the average viewer. In viewing the film, we understand  what a tragedy it was for him to lose the majority of his life’s work. How hard it must have been for him to go from the top of an industry to a pauper in almost an instant.  It must have been tortuous just to watch people walking to their daily destinations, with each shoe heel like a slap in the face. It is clear the loss of these films is a great loss for us all. How could something as important and relevant as early movies be turned into something as arbitrary as shoe heels? It’s like finding the location of the Temple of David and deciding to build a mall on its foundations.

            Reading some of the reviews for this film was interesting. Some of them seemed more concerned with the idea of 3-D than the historical relevance of Méliès. I am not a fan of 3-D, regardless of whether or not it can enhance a film, because it gives me pulsing eye/headaches. Overall, I had a difficult time finding a bad review for this film. The only one I found was “How Unique got Ordinary” by Armond White, who seemed irate at Martin Scorsese’s supposed fall from greatness but unconcerned with the movie itself. White goes on and on about how Scorsese has become a hack, sounding more like a jilted lover than an objective reviewer. I am not sure what he expected, but the movie is clearly a family film, meant to showcase George Méliès’ life. White also seemed to think that Scorsese overdoes the importance of the historical references, calling Méliès’ films “unwatchable, only notable as historic footnotes.”

Georges Melies (1861-1938)

            Personally I thought many of Méliès’s films were charming. Viewing them is like looking at old photographs of your great-grandparents. You look at the old photos of people who never seem to be smiling and try to figure out how you came from such stern-looking people. What events occurred from their time to yours that allowed you to become who you are? Méliès’ films, and other films like his, are similar in that they are a glance back. They paved the path through history to tell us who we are, which forces us to speculate on who we will become.

            Not to mention, isn’t it important to give credit where it is due? If not for men like Méliès, there would be no Scorsese to critique. Without Méliès, who was willing to throw his whole life into something as tenuous and new as the flickers, where might cinema be? Would it have been just a passing fancy, like Edison thought it would be?  We will never know, but the fact remains he was one of the first, and he was certainly the first to think of movies as a way to bend reality. Which is the main reason I go to the movies: I want to leave the real behind and become a part of the impossible.                        --Diana Kopecky