A Nativity Card

Maria has been trying to write a play about Christmas and it has been frustrating, especially when I told her, probably mistakenly, that a play needed a beginning, middle, and end. To curb her frustration, she decided to put together a Nativity play. We shot it, then edited it together, and then chose the music. It turned out well, I think, and it is surprisingly moving, at least to a dad.

We liked it so much that we made it our Christmas card.

Hope you like it.

Hugo and the Invention of Cinema

During one of my days watching the kids at the local library two years ago, I spotted a fat book with a brassy award circle on it. Always a sucker for award books, I picked it up, checked it out, took it home and read it that night. I almost couldn't believe how magical it was--in form, narrative, mystery, and execution. Reading it became one of those experiences where you finish and look around to see if the ghosts of literary enchantment are actually visible this time. The book was called The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

I tried to read it again with Maria and Henry, but they got a bit spooked by the feeling of the unknown that makes up the beginning of the book, so Kathryn told me I couldn't read it to them. A year later, I checked it out again, at Maria's urging, and read it to Maria and Henry, who were mesmerized. A few months later, a theatrical trailer appeared, just called Hugo, on the Apple trailers site that the kids and I frequent to look for upcoming movies. The film of our book was going be made, by Martin Scorsese no less, and in a color and set that seemed just right. It seemed like we had hired Scorsese ourselves to treat our precious book, and we got pretty excited. We finally saw the film last Saturday in the local theater.

This last summer I took a Mellon dissertation seminar from Garrett Stewart, a professor  of Victorian literature and narrative theory in our department. Two of his last three books have been about film, particularly how each frame in a non-digital film works as narrative time. I'll leave it at that--to get into the details of the argument would be beyond the realm of this blog, but some of the principles on which Stewart works will weave their way back into my discussion of Hugo, or suture their way back in? edit their way back in? I don't know, but the verb would seem important to him, so I'll have to think about it. I have always really enjoyed Garrett as a teacher and scholar, a man whose generosity is equal to his hyperdrive mind, and we bonded, sort of, over an interest in films that use filmed time as a plot device and set piece, like Deja Vu and Source Code. For some reason, as the seminar went on, The Invention of Hugo Cabret kept creeping into my mind, and I wanted nothing more than to assign the book to the rest of the class, a typical response of a graduate student that thinks he found the "perfect" text for a course. Here are some thoughts about Selznick's book, which I do not have copy of, so it'll have to be from memory:

Invention was written as a "graphic" novel, although its form is not in the "panels" manner of cartoons, where the page is separated by windows each showing a different scene, simultaneous narration and dialogue occurring in different fonts. Rather, the book has a series of drawings, one per page before or after a series of paragraphs, in much the same way a silent movie would work. Image, image, image, image, text, text, text, image. The difference is that the text does not describe the previous images but rather narrates what the images can't, so that the image and the text function side by side but do not overlap in description. Instead of having the words "Hugo ran into the air funnel at the end of the hallway," the book will have three or four pages that show Hugo running down the hall and then entering the air funnel. Once inside, text will appear, something like "Hugo thought about his encounter . . . " as if the drawings were part of the action rather than supplements. This is interesting, but not necessarily new. What makes Invention so different is the way the pictures not only narrate but also frame. When Hugo is running down the hall, you first see his whole body running, then the next picture you'll see his upper body, then the next you'll see just his face exerting energy, then the next you'll see only his eye, which is reflecting something, perhaps a toy store, perhaps a clock. The technique is cinematic, with good reason--the book's plot hinges on the role of movies in constructing our idea of character, narrative, and moral. I don't want to ruin the sense of magic that comes from the plot unfolding, so I won't explain how, but movies move frame by frame, a fluid picture consisting of thousands of individual pictures: the longest picture books ever made.

This is why I think reading the book and then seeing the movie is the order in which one ought to go about experiencing art, at least for this particular story. The film is not an adaptation of a straight novel--all text--it is an adaptation of an already cinematic book, in the real sense of the word. Let me see if I can articulate this better: there are moments in the book where the reader can flip the pages quickly, and it is almost as if animation occurs. This phenomenon is the principal conceit of the book: stillness made into movement, animation, becomes the central metaphor. The story hinges on the animation of an automaton, a robot made of gears that must be wound up, a (very) complicated version of a clock. The "message" in Invention depends on the animation of this automaton--otherwise, it is hidden in the rusty gears. Hugo's quest is to bring movement to the automaton while his day job is to keep constant the movement of the clocks inside the train station. Again, stillness made into movement is the point of the book, which is why reading a book--a still object with stills as pictures before watching the film--a moving picture with fluid (especially the Scorsese tracking shots) movement. When I say conceit, I mean this is the same thing that needs to happen to Hugo, the automaton, Papa Georges, and the Film Institute: something needs to animate, or reanimate, them in order to release them from simple existence. Sounds corny, but it is given profound formal implication by the perpetually moving clocks that always frame these characters (clocks that constantly need to be rewound).

Invention begins with the silhouette of the moon, a symbol of such literary overuse that it has now become a dead metaphor. The moon, and its metaphorical meanings, also need to be reanimated, and by the middle of the book, the moon has taken on a new significance--literally animated by Georges Melies and drawn by the automaton. As a metaphor, the moon has taken a shot to the eye, and soon all the signs and symbols of Invention begin to ask to read as living metaphors: clocks, trains, gears, keys--these are the symbols of children's books, always allegorical. But here these signs are given new life: the sound of the clock becomes the sound of the projector (something Scorsese highlights), the oncoming train in the train station becomes the Lumiere brothers' first film, the film that frightened its audience by seeming to spill off the screen into the theater, the key, in the shape of a heart, becomes the heart of the automaton, and so on--it is as if the signs come together literally to create the plot and figuratively to give it meaning.

The only space in which symbols function literally and figuratively simultaneously is in dreams. And here is where Invention becomes really interesting: Hugo describes films as dreams, if I remember right, and Georges Melies's operating principle was that cinema could come from dreams but also influence dreams, become the raw materials of dreams. The cinema-as-dreams has a long critical history, with which I am not entirely familiar, but the experience of Melies's films have that overt quality, which makes them charming and creepy at the same time. The way Hugo's story, that of an orphan in a Dickensian universe of children in peril, evil station masters and drunkard uncles, opens up into the story of the birth of film is like a dream as well: built on genres and conventions already part of our narrative subconscious but melding into surreal images and expansive situations. Hugo's own dream, of the train bursting through the station, is part of a memory not necessarily of Hugo himself but of a real event that had occurred in the station--his dream came from a true event that he was not aware of but had nevertheless been formed by archival images.

Archival images, images sustained in the brain's archive, resurface in dreams. Those images, more often than not, come from the movies. I don't want to overdo the importance of the movies as creators of consciousness, but I do want to suggest that they help give shape to the unconscious, one of the strange phenomena of modern culture.

I really enjoyed Scorsese's take on all of this, even if the film did not hold the magic that the book had, primarily because the narrative did not expand for me the third time around. Nevertheless, Scorsese turns out to be the perfect director for this story, understanding its implications for the preservation of films and the importance of the birth of film. He also, thankfully, understands the way the form of books create the basis on which movies can be experienced. A key moment in the book, and less so in the film, is when Hugo discovers that books are the building blocks of reconstructing experience, and the station library becomes the archive of knowledge whereas the cinema becomes the archive of the unconscious. That is all to say that if there was ever a book to film transferral that needs to be studied in depth for its thematic import, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Hugo seems to be one of the most sophisticated and self-aware documents for it.

I haven't said much about the movie itself. It is an excellent movie, full of nice details like the performance of Ben Kingsley and Sacha Baron Cohen, close attention to the idea of a "set" as a studio--all sorts of details that are surprising and lovely. But the movie to me seems secondary to the simple idea of the thing--the idea that books can lay the foundation for imaginative discoveries that ultimately define you, both in a self-empowered "potential" kind of way but also in a very literal, where did I come from kind of way.