All things considered, Martin Scorsese may be the world’s most famous cinephile. Even among a crop of directors once dubbed the “Movie Brats,” his passion and breadth of knowledge has stood apart, characteristics backed up by an effortless faculty for expressing that fervor. These qualities are on clear display in My Voyage to Italy, a film that fully articulates this love while also getting to its roots. Free from clannishness or condescension, his survey of mid-century Italian cinema doubles as a welcoming invitation to share in the greatness of the movies that shaped his artistic voice, as well as his overall outlook on life.
Much of this openness is explained by the way Scorsese first became acquainted with foreign films, not alone in darkened theaters, but as part of regular domestic activity. Backed up by ample home movie footage from the period before he was born, the director begins by delving into the highly circumscribed world of Manhattan’s Little Italy. The particular focus is Elizabeth Street, part of an immigrant system so codified that those hailing from his father’s family’s specific Sicilian town clustered to one side of the street. Those from his mother’s, only a few miles away in the old country, nonetheless congregated on the other, the two sides barely associating at all. By the time of his youth, that old wariness had softened, and the scarcity of television sets created an opportunity for communal cultural consumption, a nightly family viewing activity where the entire extended clan could gather. Due to the high number of Italian immigrants in the area, and a low level of content being produced for the medium, primetime hours were full of Italian movies, ported over cheaply to American sets.
While often pitched toward artistic ambitions, these movies nevertheless made sense to Scorsese’s relatives, connecting them on an experiential level back to the land they’d left behind. As a child, he thus found himself fascinated both by these reactions and the films that inspired them; drawn toward the strange worlds they depicted, he was led to a fixation on understanding how the movies themselves were made. That obsession comes across here, in a reminiscence shot 40 years later, as the adult Scorsese lovingly emphasizes what made the entire experience so special.
Structurally, My Voyage to Italy serves as a follow-up to the earlier A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, another expansive video essay with a quasi-academic bent. Here he runs through the core postwar canon – Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni – from neorealism to the early glimmerings of modern world cinema. The choices of material are not surprising or novel, but function well as the foundation of a personal canon. The focus throughout remains less historical than personal, with each selection geared toward what the movie meant to him, and what it might possibly mean to others. The resulting four hours fly by, with the feel of a good college seminar conducted by a warm, engaging professor.
The clearest sentiment expressed by this inquiry is not just the director’s obvious dedication to the subject, but his insistence that it should be shared. Along with this comes the assurance that foreign language cinema can be approachable, even easy to engage with, if the viewer is willing to access it on a basis of similarities rather than differences. With this in mind, the flak Scorsese has received recently for refusing to grant serious consideration to superhero movies seems even more frivolous. In this respect, he’s like a chef watching people live off dog food when prime rib is available for the same price.
Beyond the ardent boosterism, My Voyage to Italy is worthwhile viewing for the insight it grants into the director’s creative process. Personal history is provided via small touches, like the images of his childhood storyboards, rich tapestries of color-penciled detail that indicate a mind bursting with vivid ideas. At one point he recalls realizing that, had his grandparents not left Italy, he might have been one of the hardscrabble orphan kids depicted in Rossellini’s Paisan. This flash of realization, by which the passive viewer is jolted into a shock of connection with a character on the other side of the planet, serves as the key to the film’s entire message. Beyond the rich artistic worlds they create, the works discussed provide the capacity for connection with a larger network of individuals whose similarities to ourselves far outstrip the differences. Gaining access to this realization, even for a kid watching on a grainy black-and-white TV in a cloistered immigrant enclave, can open up the world in ways that extend far beyond the realm of cinema itself.
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