Martin Scorsese is a movies guy. Even more than a chronicler of urban grit or macho toxicity or criminal instinct or any of the other themes that pervade his films, that’s the main thing he is. In addition to being a natural storyteller, Scorsese is fundamentally a fan of the movies which first enthralled him as a child. That’s the message that comes through clearly in his decades-spanning documentary, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, which he produced in 1995 for the British Film Institute between production of The Age of Innocence and Casino. The radically different tone between those two projects implies the existence of a palate-cleanser in between, and this thoughtful and engaging exploration of cinema’s fingerprints on Scorsese’s ever-curious mind fits the bill.
In form and structure, A Personal Journey is straightforward and free of any stylistic flourishes, putting the focus almost entirely on selected clips. In his narrative films, Scorsese has displayed a penchant for documentary-style exposition, whether it’s to illustrate how the money moves through a casino or how the game of nine-ball is played on a billiard table. These montages often feature voice-over accompanied by dynamic camera action to keep the energy up and maintain the viewer’s interest. When the subject is his cinematic influences, however, Scorsese and his collaborators (including supervising editor Thelma Schoonmaker) seem to feel no need to sex up the subject. When not showing lengthy excerpts, the camera regards Scorsese himself in a suit and tie, speaking directly to the lens in varying degrees of closeup. Occasionally other talking heads chime in, but the focus remains squarely on the films themselves, with no distractions from the magic they generate.
The title is a clue to the selection of films Scorsese offers here. This is not an objective ranking of Hollywood’s greatest productions, nor is it a critical examination of the history of American cinema. Rather, it’s a consideration of the particular films that sparked the imagination of a young movie enthusiast who saw many of these films in bits and pieces on television or in neighborhood theaters when he was growing up. The themes and illusions and stylistic devices all added up to enduring fascination, and Scorsese presents these as building blocks in his vision of what a director can be. The film is divided into chapters subtitled “The Director as ____” with various descriptors swapping in from “illusionist” to “iconoclast.”
Among the great insights Scorsese offers in his survey of both celebrated epics and B-movies is his defense of genre films, such as gangster movies and Westerns. He compares them to jazz, allowing for “endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations,” and when these genre variations are made by the masters, they say a great deal about the time in which they were made. John Wayne’s early collaboration with the director John Ford, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), featured an uncomplicated hero who operated in a world of black-and-white morality that mirrored the righteous afterglow of America’s victory in the Second World War. But less than a decade later, in The Searchers (1956), the inglorious stalemate of the Korean War and the disaffection of the underclasses was reflected in Wayne’s cruel and terrifying antihero–the scariest person in a film filled with villains. Scorsese rarely refers to his own films during these commentaries, but the parallels draw themselves as Travis Bickle, Rupert Pupkin, Henry Hill and countless other Scorsese protagonists slot into place as contemporaneous reflections of the director’s vision of the American psyche.
It’s fascinating to consider these snippets of classic and forgotten films through Scorsese’s eyes where elements of craft resonate and percolate. James Cagney’s hollow-eyed and swaggering performances prefigure Robert De Niro’s lupine presence. The bold shadows and low camera angles of Depression-era gangster flicks map directly onto the photography and mood of Raging Bull. Scorsese makes the point that the directors of low-budget B-films often exercised greater freedom of expression than the makers of more prestigious studio productions where flush budgets brought greater scrutiny and discouraged risk taking. During the ‘50s, he asserts, with the paranoia of McCarthyism and the nascent dissolution of middle class values, the subtext of films became more interesting than the subject matter itself. It was the genre films, often made by unschooled amateurs, which snuck under the radar with subversive themes and individualistic depictions of human psychology. He categorizes this phenomenon as “The Director as Smuggler,” and it’s clear that this sensibility has colored his own development as a filmmaker.
Notably absent from the films discussed here are the movies made by Scorsese’s contemporaries, although Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and a few others chime in with commentary. The timeline ends in the late ’60s when the director began making his own movies. It’s also interesting that he focuses solely on American films, since he has clearly been influenced by international masters like Fellini, Kurosawa and others. Despite this narrowed focus, A Personal Journey is a detailed inventory of the contents of a toolbox that Scorsese used to assemble everything he’s done, and he’s not shy about pointing out exactly where his inspiration is rooted. While his reputation has already established him as a master of cinematic form and technique, he asserts that he doesn’t see himself that way. On the contrary, he finds himself returning again and again to the old films that first inspired him because, more than a creator or a viewer, he remains a dedicated and enthusiastic student of cinema.
The post Oeuvre: Scorsese: A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies appeared first on Spectrum Culture.