Episode 55 - Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011) (with Eric Smoodin)
Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
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.
Suggested Readings
Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb, eds. Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, Vol.1 (London: Wallflower Press, 2009).
Walter Benjamin, “The Artwork in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (trans. Harry Zorn, London: Cape Limited, 1970), 211-245.
Alan Cholodenko, “Speculations on the Animatic Automaton,” in The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007), 486-528.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment,” in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, eds. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hegner (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 27-43.
R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books, 1991).
Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant, “Introduction: Approaching Fantasy/Animation,” in Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres, eds. Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant (London & New York: Routledge, 2018).
Eric Smoodin, Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
Owen Weetch, Expressive Spaces in Digital 3D Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2016).
Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998).