![]() Just as the story’s crucial link of cinema to life is provided by means of a human-scale, wind-up automaton, so the same technology is applied to the mechanical leg of a victim of Verdun to make it work in a more lifelike way. Scorsese’s film sets up, from the outset, two other connections that it ultimately makes explicit and that are themselves connected: the one between cinema and robotics, and, in turn, between cinema and prosthetics. And a musical cue in “Hugo”-Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre,” which plays repeatedly there, as it plays at length (from a player piano) in the same extended sequence in Renoir’s film (the DVD release of which I discussed in the magazine a few weeks ago)-makes explicit the connection. His relationship to his m�nagerie of mechanical delights is anything but inhuman-he’s a connoisseur of utterly human, utterly sympathetic pleasures, and exquisitely sensitive to the genius and the dexterity required to simulate the self-stirring harmonies of purposive human action by means of mere gears and springs.Ĭheyniest is an inspired curator and a gifted impresario, an aristocratic version of Henri Langlois, the impassioned collector and projector of films whose recognition of the artistic importance of silent films-in the nineteen-thirties, a time when he was scrounging them from garbage heaps-led to his founding of the Cinémathèque Française, the institution where the future filmmakers of the French New Wave cut their critical teeth. ![]() There’s a miraculous moment in one of the all-time great DVD supplements-a segment from Jacques Rivette’s 1967 film “Jean Renoir, The Boss,” featured on the second disk of Criterion’s release of “The Rules of the Game”-in which Renoir cites the shot he considers the best he ever made, which is from that 1939 film: the tracking shot of the massive music machine of the Marquis de la Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio) that ends with the aristocrat himself, presenting his prize possession to his assembled guests with pride and humility-pride in his taste and humility before its object, pride in his possession of the fabulous contrivance, and humility before its invention. Because the world is very noisy, Elodie, and although life is filled with joy and wonder, there’s evil and sorrow and injustice, too.In his review of Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” in the magazine this week, David Denby writes, “No other work of art has demonstrated so explicitly how gears, springs, shutters, wheels, and tracks can generate wonders.” I think it’s a tie. What it is to share one’s life, to really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls. ![]() “I’m telling you all this not because I feel like a stroll down memory lane or because I like to tell my young friends sad stories on sunny Friday evenings I just- I wanted you to understand. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.” She topped up their glasses. And not like a mad person who refuses to recognize adversity, but like someone who accepts that life is inherently unfair. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things-many’s the time I saw him weep-but he dealt with his disappointment, with his hardship and grief he picked himself up and went on, every time. So resilient, I suppose-that seems to be the word du jour. ![]()
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