Rear Window Vs Metropolis

The visual splendour throughout Hugo is mostly derived from its 1930s Parisian train station setting. The light and colour of the production design are heightened to create an expressive fairy tale world, which nevertheless remains grounded in a recognisable reality without ever slipping into overt whimsy or Magic Realism. The true visual flourishes occur when the audience are taken behind-the-scenes of the station, into the hidden passages and rooms occupied by the orphaned boy Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield). In these labyrinthine catacombs, Hugo is surrounded by the mechanics of the station clocks he maintains and the automaton he is trying to repair. Echoes of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis can be felt throughout these scenes while

Like Metropolis Hugo is a spectacle film filled with special effects and like Rear Window the subplots that are literally in the background of the film blend into the principle story. All three films use the technology of the day to explore the boundaries between private and public spaces, and what happens when those spaces are collapsed. In the case of Hugo the technology of the day is the glorious 3D, which creates the best depth-of-field in a narrative film since Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). Illuminated specks of dust floating in the air feel like they are in front of your eyes and in one notable scene Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays Inspector Gustav, is given a dramatic close-up where it looks like his head will float out of the screen like a giant

The constant shots of clocks and the sound of the ticking on the soundtrack evoke the period of change and progress between the two World Wars, but also the rush away from the past, which runs the risk of forgetting people, events and artefacts that deserve better recognition. The uncanny figure of the lifelike yet artificial body of the automaton is both a symbol of humanity that has been damaged, fragmented and made expendable by war, but also the hope that technology can be a liberating and hopeful force to create a better world. Both are also reminders that we are living in a time where we receive a constant barrage of information, manufactured images and other sensory stimuli to an extent that even cultural theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin probably could not have imagined when he was examining modernity and cinema in essays such as his 1936 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (which would have been a nice alternative title for Hugo). It’s likely that Hugo’s Rear Window-style multi-perceptive narrative, the use of 3D and production design to represent city spaces as ever changing experiences, and the Parisian train station and arcade setting would have thrilled