With the release of Hugo in 2011, director Martin Scorsese provided the film audience with a loving look back to a time in cinematic history when the work of French film-makers like the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès populated Parisian entertainment venues. This was the world that experienced Méliès’ celebrated Le voyage dans la lune (1902) and Le cake-walk infernal (1903) to the amazement of audiences, the latter featuring a blackface couple negotiating the dance’s steps in the halls of hell. And this was the world that Claude Debussy inhabited, where blackface minstrelsy and the cakewalk danced by African Americans coexisted on stages and film screens.