ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Hugo in relation to the conceptual space of the archive, historiography, and temporality suggested by Scorsese, Tabard, and Derrida. It argues Hugo enacts a complex historiographical project as an allusionist text, as a performative history lesson, and as a particular kind of archive of silent cinema. A collection of silent film intertexts, Hugo invokes the archive as a database, that is, an unstructured grouping of documents on a specific topic subject to various future uses. Historical photographs of Melies are sources for allusion in the film. A second historical photograph is of Melies painting flats with co-workers in the Star Film studio in Montreuil. Hugo was the first venture into 3D by Scorsese and various interviews and articles foreground the director's biographical, cinephile, and auteurist investment in the special effect and in Melies's films more generally. The trope of the database as archive informs a number of contemporary installations that employ a "database aesthetic".
