How Martin Scorsese Pulls Off Hugo’s Nostalgia
The trouble I have with most of the retro-tech material in the contemporary art galleries is that it ends up feeling desiccated, with inventions that were never really meant to be contemplated as freestanding works of art now isolated from the history that gave them their meaning. What might originally have been a technological marvel—a figure that moves, a machine that speaks—becomes at best a historical specimen, now experienced only as a Dadaist object, a variation on one of Duchamp’s Readymades. The secret of Scorsese’s success in Hugo has everything to do with the inherently impure and unstable nature of the movies, where art can be precipitated by—can maybe even be a by-product of—technological innovation. Say what you will, that’s not possible in an art gallery, where purity and stability are the standard and traditions have to be transformed gradually, from within.
Working in a medium that is nothing if not forward looking, Scorsese can afford to indulge in a nostalgia that from the very different perspective of the art gallery amounts to little more than tradition reduced to kitsch. With Hugo, Scorsese has reintegrated the technological exhilaration of times past into a work of cinematic art we accept as absolutely alive in the present. We see everything—the automaton’s clockwork body, Méliès elaborately hand-colored movies, the spectacle of 1930s Paris—through Asa Butterfield’s young, avid eyes.
Read the full essay here