Good morning 🐣

The setting is France, 1890.

A man boards a train from Dijon to Paris but never reaches his destination. The last person to see him alive is his brother.

Some say there was a dispute over their mother’s will.

Others wonder if he was murdered by none other than Thomas Edison.

These are just two theories on the mysterious disappearance of Louis Le Prince, who author Paul Fischer claims is the true father of motion pictures, not Edison, in his new book, “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies.”

Fischer writes that the story of cinema begins on October 14, 1888, when Le Prince recorded a clip only two seconds long of a group of people in an English garden. The oldest surviving motion picture in existence, and the invention Le Prince toiled over, became footnotes when Le Prince boarded that train less than two years later and was never seen nor heard from again. But history had other plans and motion picture cameras continued to be developed and refined on both sides of the Atlantic.

We take the moving image for granted nowadays, but society completely changed when it was first invented. Fischer writes:

The past would become available to the future. The dead would move, and walk, and dance, and laugh, anytime you wished to see them do all these things again. … No human experience, from the most benign to the most momentous, would again need to be lost to history.

Cinema changed how we remembered and how we interacted with the rest of the world. Now people could see completely different cultures with their own eyes for the small price of a movie ticket. And they could travel through the most fantastical dreams collectively.

This was an exciting time in Paris, when people like Georges Méliès began experimenting visually. In the absence of sound, early filmmakers had to rely entirely on imagery to convey plot and emotion. They employed their experience in stagecraft and illusions and were influenced by all the other innovations going on around them.

I was fortunate to attend an exhibit recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that runs until July 10 called “City of Cinema: Paris 1850 – 1907.” It’s a broad collection of paintings, sculpture, posters, prints, and film from the era that gives context to everything that was going on in and around the early Parisian motion picture industry — politics, arts, technology, and changes in society.

The museum even curated its own soundtrack if you want to bop around the streets of 19th-century Paris.

The French film culture and technique continued to develop over the decades, influencing and being influenced by other film industries, including Hollywood. One silent film pioneer was Julien Duvivier. Film scholar David Bordwell writes:

At one level, he saw the need for spectacle — either shooting on striking locations, employing masses of actors, or creating flamboyant studio sets. At another level, the visual storytelling could be more inward-turning. How could moving images illuminate the thoughts and feelings of characters, the access to minds given through language in prose fiction and on stage? We can see in Duvivier’s late silent work a pressure in both directions: a love of eye-smiting locations either found or fabricated, and an urge to plunge into characters’ minds at every moment.

One of his favorite devices is the superimposition — not as a single item, … but as a flurry of images melting into one another, suggesting a stream of consciousness.

Now watch this 👀

When you think of the director Martin Scorsese, the first things you picture are probably films about crime, insecure men overcompensating in their machismo, and Catholic guilt: “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas,” “Gangs of New York,” “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Lots of violence and lots of profanity.

But you can see the imprints of French film and Impressionism all over his works. He has an absolute love for cinema, which is so perfectly expressed in “Hugo” (HBO Max and on demand), a film that seems out of character at first glance, but fits right in with the rest of his filmography.

It stars Asa Butterfield as Hugo Cabret, an orphan living in the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s, maintaining the clocks and avoiding the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). When Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her godfather (Ben Kingsley) enter Hugo’s life, he becomes determined to solve a mystery about a broken automaton that his father left him.

Based on the novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” which author Brian Selznick describes as “not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things,” the film is a love letter to cinema — going on to win five Academy Awards in 2012 — and pays homage to silent films and other inspirations:

• Harold Lloyd’s infamous scene from 1923’s “Safety Last” when he hangs from a building’s clock-face in Downtown Los Angeles;
• the life and works of Georges Méliès;
• Robin Hood; and
• the poet Christina Rossetti.

“Hugo” may not be about Vietnam vets and prostitutes, but it does center around a broken little boy avoiding the police and trying to find meaning in life, and a broken old man wanting to forget his past. When commenting on the dusty, old automaton:

Isabelle: He looks sad.

Hugo: He’s just waiting to work again… to do what he’s supposed to do.

At times it has a madcap energy following around the characters at the train station, only to take a moment to savor the way steam rises off freshly baked croissants. Amid all the machinery, the film pushes for humanity and purpose.

In fact our first glimpse of Hugo (as seen above) is of his face hidden in a clock, a literal cog in a machine. By the end he’s not the only character that has embraced life and re-engaged with the outside world.

Until next time! 👋

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