The difference between seeing and seeing through

Through our journey from invention to magic to cinema, we had an extra session this week to view a movie about the same exact transition from invention to magic to cinema, “Hugo”. From only watching the film I could see that the movie was about a boy named Hugo who lived in a train station winding clocks and trying to fix an automaton that was a legacy from his father, crossing paths with George Melies, the famous old cinema director, when Hugo was trying to steal parts from his workshop he opened after being long-forgotten and even thought as dead in the war. The movie in my opinion was just a descriptive about the age of invention (19^th century), the evolution of cinema and the widespread phenomenon of orphan hood appearing after WW1. It also gave me a feeling that even in the age where inventions where the only trend, books where very significant to them, which appeared in the character of Isabelle, a main character in the story, and in how she had a sophisticated sense of literature and love of books. The movie scenes built on each other to lead to the point where the automaton function was revealed after being repaired; it turned out to be a property of George Melies himself, God-father of Isabelle, revealing his true identity that he chose to forget and live without in his workshop. This is how I saw the movie at first at least.

However, the professor assigned a reading to us, an analysis about the movie: “Jennifer Clement and Christian B. Long. “Hugo, Remediation, and the Cinema of Attractions, or, the Adaptation of Hugo Cabret”. After reading it thoroughly, I realized that there is more to the movie than just its story-line; I understood how the movie brought out the idea of “the image and the word are complimentary” and how the movie resembled all of that in the automaton throughout the story. I also observed how the movie was interested in the issue of work as in how each and every one of us has their purpose in life (The big machine we live in) and without doing our jobs, the machine will fail because (one of the gears is not in place). Furthermore, the analysis made me notice that the movie was an adaptation of the book “The invention of Hugo Cabret” and how that adaptation was sophisticated and indirect. The book itself told stories about old movies and images, while the movie adaptation told the story of the book in a new movie showing the importance of books along the story-line, the thought is incredible to have. This was when I realized that analysis and looking through the lines and scenes may give us more information, answers and conclusions to critical questions.