Magic, Cinema, and Imagination Theme Analysis

The Invention of Hugo Cabret explores the real historical relationship between magic and the cinema. Movies were created at the very end of the 19th century, and, at the time, they seemed like magic to their audiences. No one had ever seen anything like them before and only those who made them knew how they worked. In The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo reads a real story about how people screamed when they first saw the Lumiere brothers’ film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat—which simply shows a train arriving at a station. People watching the film thought the train might crash right through the screen and hurt them. However, like magic, the film was merely an illusion.

The relationship between magic and films was cemented when magicians began making films. The most famous magician filmmaker was Georges Méliès, who features prominently in The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Méliès is perhaps the most important filmmaker of the later 19th and early 20th century because he was the first person to develop a number of filmmaking techniques, which closely resembled magic tricks. Additionally, Méliès was one of the first people to make narrative films. Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) was his crowning achievement and features prominently in The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Throughout The Invention of Hugo Cabret, movies are described as the stuff dreams are made of. There is an indescribable quality which Hugo, Hugo’s father, Georges, Jeanne, and Etienne all experience when they watch movies. This quality is similar to the experience of witnessing a magic trick or watching an automaton write, as Hugo and Isabelle do midway through the story. Although everything in a movie is explainable, audiences find delight in being tricked, because this experience captures the imagination in wonderful and ineffable ways. That is, movies and magic tricks fundamentally reshaped how people saw and understood reality, sparking wonder. Furthermore, in the early 20th century, movies and magic were both industries that dealt with cutting-edge technology and helped bring those technologies to large scale audiences for the first time. The novel brings the relationship between movies, magic, and the imagination full circle in its final chapter when readers learn that an automaton Hugo built wrote the entire story of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, images and all. Like the movies and magic, Hugo’s automaton is a trick, which fundamentally alters how the reader engages with the novel. It is a manipulation of one’s perception which, like watching a magic trick or film, engages the imagination and reveals the wonder of ordinary life.