The nostalgic remediation of cinema in Hugo and Paprika

Abstract

This article addresses the ways in which two recent works of digital cinema, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) revive classical (photochemical) cinema through what is termed ‘nostalgic remediation’. Rather than seeing nostalgia as ironic, ahistorical pastiche, as in Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodern nostalgia films, this article asks: how can we understand nostalgia as part of our own lived, affective experience of film within today’s new media ecology? To answer this question, it draws on theories of post-celluloid adaptation and remediation to demonstrate the ambivalent relationships between historical and current media platforms seen in digital cinema. These ambivalences, it is argued, reflect the broader anxieties and aspirations that arise in times of technological and social transition, such as the changes brought about by the digitization of media at the turn of the twenty-first century. Hugo and Paprika perfectly illustrate the delicate tension of nostalgic remediation, which shifts between transcending celluloid cinema and longing for its return; between the recovery and loss of cinema’s historical memory; and between the concepts of old and new media themselves.

Camera Arriving at the Station: Cinematic Memory as Cultural Memory

“…The shot concludes with the close-up of Hugo (Asa Butterfield) looking out at the world of the station, which is what he spends most of his time doing when not maintaining its many clocks. This opening thus eloquently announces what Annett calls the film's ironically "nostalgic remediation" of cinema's past by means of the latest digital technology [8]. Yet, for all its digital showiness, this shot is no more typical of Hugo than any number of conventional pre-digital techniques and transitions, the intensified style David Bordwell identifies as the dominant idiom in contemporary popular cinema the world over [35].…”

“…Beginning with the image of Paris as a vast clockwork mechanism [7], this shot "blurs the boundaries between aerial, crane, and tracking shots by moving between them without cuts. And it flaunts the fact that there is no physical track by showing the virtual camera gliding…over luggage and benches right up to the clock" [8]. The shot concludes with the close-up of Hugo (Asa Butterfield) looking out at the world of the station, which is what he spends most of his time doing when not maintaining its many clocks.…”

“…Annett quotes Robert Kolker, who says: "While the mise-en-scène of [Scorsese's] films is incredibly detailed, the camera often moves through it quickly, using tracking shots or unusual framings to draw attention not only to what is seen but also to the act of watching itself. A particular feature of [Scorsese's] style is the long tracking shot that traces a character or the camera's point of view through a space in a single take" [8]. Beginning with the image of Paris as a vast clockwork mechanism [7], this shot "blurs the boundaries between aerial, crane, and tracking shots by moving between them without cuts.…”

“…If we take Freud literally here-and there seems no reason not to, since the whole of contemporary popular culture is predicated upon just this sort of naive pop-psychoanalytic literalism-it is possible to discern in Inception, for instance, the extension of this idea to the prospect of dreams summoning forth memories of things the subject never actually experienced, things that were planted there, in the subject's "sub-conscious" (note the term), but which are taken for the deepest, most intimate of personal truths. Of course, where, in actuality, our only access to dream memory is via waking memory, 8 in Inception's science fictional scenario, dream memory content is directly accessible and eminently visible, because (in the film) it looks more or less the same as waking reality. (This is also true of Hugo's dream scenes, which, by comparison, are far more conventional, insofar as they represent a character's "normal" dream state.…”

“…(Where Hugo contains a key flashback and dream scenes, Inception can be read as either one long dream scene or one long flashback [6], or both at once.) Additionally, while Hugo's nostalgia for cinema's past has been much remarked upon, as has Inception's allegorization of the filmmaking process [8][9][10], I go further here by connecting each film's status as remediated dream-memory to its respective dependence upon the city (a specific city, but also "the city" in general) as a post-cinematic three-dimensional framework within which locative and locomotive desires alike determine a subject whose psyche is indistinguishable from the cityscape that surrounds him.…”