Trains of Thought

Martin Scorsese's HUGO is set in Paris’ Montparnasse railway station: not a bad in-joke when you think that the film is a boy's fantasy about the origins of cinema, now in 3D. And although Scorsese purports to tell the story of Georges Méliès as the inventor of cinema, it is the Lumière Brothers’ ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN that prominently features at a key point in the narrative, when Méliès the magician acquires vital filmmaking equipment and know-how from the Lumières. There is another in-joke inside the in-joke: the boy has a terrifying nightmare of a train roaring into Montparnasse station and nearly running him over, a scene that is repeated ‘for real’ towards the end when Hugo is rescued by his tormentor, the station officer, thus preparing the happy ending. Yet for the cinephile, there is an in-joke within the in-joke within the in-joke. The train seen roaring twice into the station is not just any old train, and not even an old train from the 1920s. It is the digitally enhanced proleptic train from Jean Renoir's 1938 LA BÊTE HUMAINE, complete with Jean Gabin's begoggled sooty face leaning out of the locomotive: Scorsese's mise-en-abyme of film history in reverse is giving us this train wreck as in-joke in 3D, considered as a temporal anamorph rather than an optical effect. Not only does it neatly balance the director's homage to (French) film culture and cinephilia with a somewhat more ambiguous appropriation of Méliès’ genius as the ‘precursor’ of Hollywood's 3D revival (making Scorsese, the well-respected champion of film preservation, also the legitimate heir to Méliès’ ‘lost’ legacy). It also hints at a change of paradigm in the way we might come to look at 3D itself: not as a special effect in the field of cinematic vision but a different kind of ‘mental image’ (or ‘crystal image’, to use Gilles Deleuze’ terminology), fitting for an age and a time when cinema (and television) history is likely to become the only history our culture has an affective ‘memory’ of, and when time has become a function of space. What train of thought might have led to this supposition?