From the outset, music has been a consistent element of Martin Scorsese’s career, utilized via a signature jukebox model in which familiar songs enhance, tweak or amplify the feelings evoked onscreen. Much emulated but rarely matched, this style clearly draws from a deep well of knowledge, reference points which inform the aesthetics and rhythm of the director’s work nearly as much as his vaunted cinematic influences. It’s fitting then that he would open the late period of his career with a series of music-focused nonfiction pieces, following up on the pair of academic-leaning film history projects put together in the late ‘90s. This vein would eventually develop into longform studies of such legends as Bob Dylan, George Harrison and the Rolling Stones, but his first outing starts at the beginning, chronicling the foundational principles of American blues.
As with many Scorsese docs of this era, Feel Like Going Home qualifies as a certified deep cut, sought out only by completists, partially because it’s so hard to track down. Airing on PBS as the first episode of Martin Scorsese Presents: The Blues, it also serves as an early entry into TV, where he’d continue to work in the following decades, largely as a producer for semi-prestige HBO programming. Here, the approach is a little more adventurous, with 70 minutes of loose, conversational material that illuminates the mythic fringes of early American music. Avoiding the urban rhythms of the electric era, the focus remains resolutely rural, tracing the same type of trail beaten by the early journeymen who helped define the form. Other episodes explore different stories and styles, with the baton passed to a strong stable of colleagues for the remainder of the series, from Wim Wenders to Charles Burnett and Clint Eastwood.
Written by music historian and journalist Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home manages to mix casual storytelling and performance footage with a concise informational payload, in a manner that’s more akin to modern streaming content than the PBS documentary cohorts of its own era. Blues guitarist Corey Harris acts as emissary, taking viewers on a journey through the Deep South and on back to West Africa, which finds him seeking out musical connections with a bevy of old masters. These range from Otha Turner, a ninety-something Mississippian practitioner of the nearly extinct Fife and Drum style, a blues antecedent, to famed Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté.
Expansive in scope if not in length, this roving tour serves as a reminder that the genre doesn’t begin and end with Delta blues. It also manages to foreground its fabled origins without entirely dispelling their mystique, offering context for an early figure like Robert Johnson, while still maintaining some of his legendary aura. As is often the case, history is an overt theme, with the importance of preservation serving as a significant throughline. More formally adventurous than might be expected, the film unites past and present through a fusion of archival footage and live performance. The putty for this amalgam is a string of conceptual sequences, breaking the music down into pure abstraction, likely a contribution by DP and video artist Arthur Jafa.
The conclusion drawn is that while the surface qualities of the music have changed, its essential rhythms remain the same. It’s this fundamental unity that allows Harris to connect with artists who speak different languages and practice different musical disciplines. It also grants fans of the genres eventually spawned by the blues a fuller perspective, the ability to gaze back across a centuries-long continuum of interconnected forms, spooling out behind them. In the end, this isn’t too different from Scorsese’s view of cinematic history, in which the paramount importance of earlier influences is a quality to be celebrated above all others. In the end, it all comes back to the movies, and while a relative trifle like Feel Like Going Home doesn’t rank among the director’s finest work, it does serve as another vibrant connection with the earlier art that helped to inspire his own.
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