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Behind the scenes of the complex steadicam shot that closes out Hugo

What’s remarkable about Hugo is that, using the most impure of techniques, Scorsese has rid himself of the affectation he sometimes falls prey to. The close-ups of clack- ing billiard balls in The Color of Money, the endless sweeps and pans of Goodfellas, and the moribund Casino, acclaimed as the work of an expressionist auteur, looked like a cinema-mad kid showing o√, proficient but empty. Telling his story through the eyes of a wonderstruck orphan, re-creating the simplest tricks of early movies, and using a technique that, as a vehicle for thrusting swords and thrusting bosoms, cheap scares and cheap thrills, has always smelled strongly of the carnival midway, Scorsese has never seemed a more sophisticated showman. For a director who has long professed his passion for movies, there’s a sweet joke in putting his characters – and his audience – as much at the mercy of them as he has claimed to be. The whirring gears of Hugo’s hidden abode cast him in a perpetual flickering light, as if he’s standing by a projector; he and his friend Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) thrill to the sight of Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a clock, and later, escaping the clutches of the stationmaster (Sasha Baron Cohen), Hugo finds himself in the same position. Scorsese re-creates the moment of an early movie audience watching the Lumière Brothers’ film of a train pulling into a station and jumping out of the way. That story is always told to prove how naive moviegoers once were, and how sophisticated we are by comparison. But a movie that is implicitly about what is still vital in cinema’s past can’t settle for easy superiority. And damned if, by the end of Hugo, Scorsese hasn’t put us in the same position, pushing back in our seats as 3D brings a hurtling train right at us. It’s a terribly sly moment, one aimed – good- naturedly – at the blasé knowingness that’s now assumed to be the attitude of contemporary moviegoers. By puncturing that, Scorsese is professing an implicit faith in the ability of a movie audience to still be thrilled.

Charles Taylor, "Film in Review: Not Even Past", The Yale Review, October 2012

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Cinema Paradiso

Maria Di Vita: See how nice the house is? We had it all redone, all thanks to you. I have a surprise for you. Come. Are you tired? You have time to rest before the funeral.

Salvatore: No, Mama, it's only an hour by plane.

Maria Di Vita: Don't tell me that after all these years.

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Cinema Paradiso is a film that makes film reception its privileged object, and it is here that Tornatore offers his distinctive contribution to the contemporary cinema of nostalgia. Though critics faulted Tornatore's citations of film classics as arbitrary and unsystematic, his method can be justified as an accurate mimesis of the way in which cinema was experienced by the provincial public of Giancaldo. Tornatore's random cinematic allusions represent the indiscriminate cinephilia of 1940s and 1950s popular culture, which made of all films, no matter how diverse, one vast invitation to imaginative escape.

Millicent Marcus, "Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso and the Art of Nostalgia", After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002

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Martin Scorcese directing on the set of Hugo using the illustrations from the original book.

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Yet anyone who loves movies is likely to love "Cinema Paradiso," and there is one scene where the projectionist finds that he can reflect the movie out of the window in his booth and out across the town square so that the images can float on a wall, there in the night above the heads of the people. I saw a similar thing happen one night in Venice in 1972 when they showed Chaplin's "City Lights" in the Piazza San Marco to more than 10,000 people, and it was then I realized the same thing this movie argues: Yes, it is tragic that the big screen has been replaced by the little one. But the real shame is that the big screens did not grow even bigger, grow so vast they were finally on the same scale as the movies they were reflecting.

Roger Ebert, "Cinema Paradiso", The Chicago Sun-Times, March 16, 1990

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A featurette on the fantastic miniature work that re-created the 1895 train crash sequence in Hugo

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