Invention of Dreams

Finally watched HUGO.. First of all, this not a review. It is an Oscar winning movie made by one of the finest dreamers and movie makers - Martin Scorsese.

This is just an account of how this movie affected me and MY experience watching it. I did not have much idea about the plot when I watched it - I let that be a mystery. And it has played to my advantage. 

The first hour I thought there was something surreal about the movie, that the AUTOMATON brings bad luck which consumed the boy's father in a fire accident. My curiosity built up  as the story progressed. The second half starts giving you hints about the mystery and the magic. There was nothing surreal about it! It was a movie about movies and a great movie-maker. How movies were thought of as a way to portray one's dreams - a medium taken for granted today. They were once thought to be a wonder and compared to illusions. It is funny to think that someone thought movies could be a passing fad, just like they thought the telephone would never be used by a common man!. As i type this, I see trailers of some of our Bollywood products. I am not sure if the inventors of cinema would be proud today. Well neither was Alfred Nobel when he saw what his invention could be used for when he made Dynamite!!

Back to HUGO, this seems to be a semi-biography of one of the greatest filmmakers - Georges Melius, who I haven't done any research on yet. The movie has been inspired from a book - "The Invention of Hugo Cabret", which goes into my reading list. 

Other than being witness to what possibly could have been a creator's dreams, who used whatever he could lay his hands on, to give life to his imagination, there were a few takeaways from a philosophical angle:

A scene where Hugo shows Isabelle, the Eiffel from a clock tower. He says he imagines the world to be a machine when he looks at it from there and that no machine comes with an extra part. It comes with exactly what it needs to function. So if we thought of the world to be a machine, no one can be an extra part, we are all here for a purpose. That was quite an analogy.

Monsieur Melius sadly says that Happy Endings happen only in movies (quite in contrast to our "picture abhi baaki hai") But Hugo disproves him by bringing to him his invention, which Melius thought was gone for good. So life does have Happy Endings , one just has to wait,  a quality many of us lack in this "8MB internet generation" and this movie serves as one good reminder.

There are several levels of interpretation and it could touch each person in different ways.

For me, it became part of a weekend I can never forget. :)