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  • Cinema and the Book: Intermediality in The Invention of Hugo Cabret
  • Elizabeth Bullen (bio), Leonie Rutherford (bio), and Ilona Urquhart (bio)

When Brian Selznick won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for the artist of the best American picturebook for his illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), it opened a discussion about what defines a picturebook. In Perry Nodelman’s view, “Hugo Cabret seems more like a graphic novel than like what [he] and many others think of as a picture book” (5). “But then,” he adds, the novel “uses none of the techniques of comic-book artists” (5). In fact, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is often defined by what it is not. Selznick describes it as “not exactly a novel, not quite a picturebook, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things” (Croker 6).1 The media combination in The Invention of Hugo Cabret marks the text as intermedial. Intermediality entails “the merger and transformation of elements of differing media” to produce “a new mixed form which is more than the sum of its parts” (Heinrichs and Spielmann 6). It has also been described as the “medial equivalent of intertextuality” (Grishakova and Ryan 3). Intermediality, then, is the intertext that transgresses not only the boundaries of text but media (Lehtonen 16), to create a new medium unlimited by convention. While the words and images that constitute the picture-book form mark it as inherently intermedial, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is distinguished by the nexus it establishes between book and cinema media and the ways in which it celebrates and strengthens the relationships between old and new media. This is produced at both the thematic and formal levels of the text, as this essay will demonstrate. The essay will address the assumption of media displacement, gradual adaptation, and innovative and creative reimagining in Selznick’s text, elucidating its original engagement with intermediality.

Set in the early 1930s, The Invention of Hugo Cabret focuses on the relationship between twelve-year-old orphan, Hugo, who lives alone in a Parisian railway station, and Papa Georges, who keeps a small toy booth [End Page 73] there. Caught thieving from the stall, Hugo is put to work to pay for the “tiny pieces of clockwork, cogs and wheels” (51) he has stolen to repair an automaton, his only memento of his late father. Hugo forms a relationship with Isabelle, Papa Georges’ goddaughter. As a result, he discovers that the old man made the automaton and thus learns of his identity as Georges Méliès, a former stage illusionist and filmmaker in the early period of cinema.2 The overall aim of the narrative arc is to find a family for the orphaned boy (McLeod) and restore Méliès’ reputation and public status as the father of French cinema.

Like its more widely known movie adaptation, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), the book narrativizes film history and documents the development of early cinema through visual references to Méliès’ oeuvre as well as Auguste and Louis Lumière’s L’arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (1895), Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923), Disney’s A Clock Store (1931), and René Clair’s Le Million (1931). Scorsese makes intertextual reference to these movies using film clips, and draws on digital technology and 3D special effects to evoke the spectacle of early celluloid films (North). However, these intertextual references are simultaneously intermedial references through Hugo’s relation to The Invention of Hugo Cabret: Selznick makes intermedial reference to the films through the reproduction of film stills and uses the older technology of the book to create its “special effects.” In The Hugo Movie Companion Selznick relates that “I decided to tell part of the story in images, like a movie. I returned to my manuscript and removed as much text as I could, replacing words with illustrated sequences so we could watch those parts of the story” (13, original emphasis).

Hugo Cabret’s adaption into a film thus seems to be preempted by its intermedial construction. Similarly, in the same movie companion, Scorsese’s description of...

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