Brian Selznick's 'The Invention of Hugo Cabret', Martin Scorsese's 'Hugo' and the Theft of Subjectivity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Unwinding the film spool: Martin Scorsese's 'Hugo' (2011), Méliès, and our return to early film.
Studies in Documentary Film, 2014
Early film is misleadingly framed in terms of a simple non-fiction/fiction binary. Early non-fiction Lumière films instead give evidence of choreographed performance just as Méliès’ magical works document the satiric and often critical humour of the French Incoherent movement. Rather than dismiss Hugo, however, the author suggests that these themes and critical concerns have been cleverly re-located and absorbed by Martin Scorsese into the choreography, performance and humour of Hugo itself.
Cinema and the Book: Intermediality in The Invention of Hugo Cabret
The Lion and the Unicorn, 2018
When Brian Selznick won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for the artist of the best American picturebook for his illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), it opened a discussion about what defines a picturebook. In Perry Nodelman's view, "Hugo Cabret seems more like a graphic novel than like what [he] and many others think of as a picture book" (5). "But then," he adds, the novel "uses none of the techniques of comic-book artists" (5). In fact, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is often defined by what it is not. Selznick describes it as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picturebook, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things" (Croker 6). 1 The media combination in The Invention of Hugo Cabret marks the text as intermedial. Intermediality entails "the merger and transformation of elements of differing media" to produce "a new mixed form which is more than the sum of its parts" (Heinrichs and Spielmann 6). It has also been described as the "medial equivalent of intertextuality" (Grishakova and Ryan 3). Intermediality, then, is the intertext that transgresses not only the boundaries of text but media (Lehtonen 16), to create a new medium unlimited by convention. While the words and images that constitute the picture-book form mark it as inherently intermedial, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is distinguished by the nexus it establishes between book and cinema media and the ways in which it celebrates and strengthens the relationships between old and new media. This is produced at both the thematic and formal levels of the text, as this essay will demonstrate. The essay will address the assumption of media displacement, gradual adaptation, and innovative and creative reimagining in Selznick's text, elucidating its original engagement with intermediality. Set in the early 1930s, The Invention of Hugo Cabret focuses on the relationship between twelve-year-old orphan, Hugo, who lives alone in a Parisian railway station, and Papa Georges, who keeps a small toy booth
Radical Reflexivity in Cinematic Adaptation: Second Thoughts on Reality, Originality, and Authority
Literature Film Quarterly, 2013
Though filmmakers and scholars have long celebrated meta-cinema, or reflexivity, as a radical and artistically sophisticated mode of cinema capable of rupturing the bourgeois "realism" of the mainstream or "Hollywood" film, a curious double standard often is applied to reflexive adaptations of literary texts.' In discussing the reflexivity of such non-adaptations as Godard's Weekend (1967) or Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003), commentators focus on the creators' edgy and knowing playfulness: "By seeing themselves not as nature's slaves but as fiction's masters, reflexive artists cast doubt on the central assumption of mimetic art-the notion of an antecedent reality on which the artistic text is supposedly modeled" (Stam 129). By casting doubt on the elemental assumptions upon which mimesis is based, in other words, these antifoundationalist films shed their secondariness-their derivativeness. Films such as Weekend, or novels such as Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote or Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, are praised for their ability to critique dominant ideological and signifying codes. In most studies of reflexive adaptations of literature, however, the films are said to be secondary to a different category of antecedent "reality," which is the source text and, often, its own superior reflexivity-whether we mean by this a play's metatheatricality, a novel's or poem's narrative reflexivity, or any source text's explicit recognition of its own constructedness. In a brief chapter on cinematic adaptations of reflexive literature, Robert Stam concludes rather simplistically that while the films often "incorporate certain reflexive devices, they do not metalinguistically dissect their own practice or include critical discourse within the text itself" (159). Moreover, reflexivity, when it occurs in cinematic adaptations of literature, is typically said to accommodate, or provide a visual parallel for, the reflexivity of the adapted text. For example, in one of the first and most influential essays on Shakesepearean metacinema, Kenneth Rothwell argues that "In making the means of representation a subject of representation, film-makers have only ~~m imicked their stage forebears" (211). Rothwell's claim reinforces several problematic ideas: first, that modes of reflexivity are identical across such different media as theater and film; second, that the Shakespeare play is always before the Shakespeare film in the sense that the so-called original text manages to anticipate all its potential metamorphoses in later readings, adaptations, and appropriations. The "original" thereby remains always superior. The 1916 Thanhouscr film of King Lear, directed by Ernest C. Warde and starring his father Frederick as the king, demonstrates well why what we might call the "accommodation argument" has proven so persuasive. The original opening of the film features the scholarly Warde in a Victorian library-like parlor. Cigar smoke clouding the air around him, he is
Brave new forms: Adaptation, remediation, and intertextuality in the multimodal world of Hugo Cabret
2014
I first fell in love with Hugo Cabret while taking Dr. Ramona Caponegro's Illustrated Texts graduate course, where I had the opportunity to read The Invention of Hugo Cabret among many other books that have now become treasured favorites, an experience for which I am profoundly grateful. Dr. Ian Wojcik-Andrews, my thesis advisor, has offered his time and expertise over numerous coffee house conversations, and I greatly appreciate his insight and interest in my work. I would also like to thank Dr. Annette Wannamaker, from whom the majority of my formal education in Children's Literature began, and whose support and encouragement throughout has been invaluable. A thank-you to Dr. Sheila Murphy and Dr. Daniel Herbert, who fostered an appreciation for early cinema, film theory, and digital technologies, and without whom my dreams of film school would not have been complete. Rachel Rickard, fellow graduate student and colleague extraordinaire, whose shared experiences and commiseration have helped me through the daunting task of teaching, studying, and writing, I am incredibly thankful. I would like to thank my parents and grandparents, whose words of encouragement always came when they were most needed. And lastly, John, who has heard countless renditions of this thesis, travelled with me across the country to present my papers on Hugo Cabret, and whose love and constant support has made this journey not only bearable but enjoyable. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
From Camera Lens to Critical Lens: A Collection of Best Essays on Film Adaptation, 2006
Ever since its beginnings, cinema has found its inspiration in many art forms, and its relationship to the theatre has always been complex. Alfred Hitchcock showed sustained interest in this ambiguous love-hate relationship and explored the boundaries between theatre and film in many film-mediated dramas. Many Hitchcock films based on stage plays foreground their stage origins rather than hide them, which is true of I Confess (1952). Also stage-bound, Le confessionnal (Robert Lepage, 1995), which was inspired by the work of Alfred Hitchcock in general, and I Confess in particular, pushes back the frontiers of fiction. Indeed, this film deals with the concept of adaptation through intertextual references to I Confess and historical rewriting. Ultimately, Lepage’s film “confesses” its sources of inspiration while exposing cinematic conventions through historical references and reflexive strategies.