Martin Scorsese's Documentary Histories

Migrations, Movies, Music

Mike Meneghetti

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501336881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Martin Scorsese's Documentary Histories: Migrations, Movies, Music is the first comprehensive study of Martin Scorsese's prolific work as a documentary filmmaker. Highlighting the historiographic aims of the director's various non-fiction film, video, and television productions, Mike Meneghetti re-examines Scorsese's documentaries as resourceful audiovisual histories of migrations, movies, and popular music. Italianamerican 's critical immersion in the post-Sixties ethnic revival inaugurates Scorsese's decades-long documentary project in 1974, and the era's developing vernacular of reclamation would shape each of his subsequent non-fiction efforts. Martin Scorsese's Documentary Histories surveys the succeeding films' decisive adherence to this language of retrieval. With extended analyses of Italianamerican, American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, The Last Waltz, Shine a Light, Feel Like Going Home, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Il mio viaggio in Italia, and A Letter to Elia among others, Meneghetti resituates Scorsese's filmmaking within the wider contexts of documentary history and American culture.

1

Historical Migrations: Italianamerican and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince

Ethnic Reminiscences: Foundations and Reveries

Commissioned by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Italianamerican (1974) was first conceived within the wider context of America’s planned Bicentennial observances in 1976. Indeed, first screened in its familiar forty-nine-minute form at the 1974 New York Film Festival, and then broadcast as an abbreviated twenty-eight-minute contribution to PBS’s commemorative A Storm of Strangers series, Scorsese’s most elemental and “personal” production was envisioned as an unassuming tribute to the period’s celebratory ethnic revival.¹ “The mid-1970s,” Matthew Frye Jacobson writes, “represented the consolidation” of a revivified ethnicity in America (2006, 17), and Scorsese’s intimate short film about his parents and their experiences as second-generation Italian Americans is in many ways a representative historical object—if its everyday backdrop and warm familial accents give it the appearance of a home movie, Italianamerican’s deepest roots can surely be found in the period’s distinctive political-cultural topography. Jacobson points to the developing interest in “genealogical research” and an associated desire to safeguard assorted types of “heritage” as defining features of the white ethnic revival, and he explains how they would finally generate novel popular idioms for national belonging in the 1970s. Moreover, and more importantly, he describes a pervasive turn to particularized accounts of America’s past during this decade, and this would decisively shift critical understandings of history to the more nebulous dimensions of subjectivity and “identity.” Jacobson’s focus on the convergence of state sponsorship and grassroots ethnic reclamation projects in the 1970s indicates the degree to which Scorsese’s documentary was embedded within—and beholden to—these cultural preoccupations. The state’s “mounting interest in pluralism” (Jacobson 2006, 54) undoubtedly led it to exploit the energy and activities on view in Italianamerican, but ethnically focused films of its kind could in turn authorize a developing commitment to the nation’s broader “mosaic” inheritance. Scorsese’s provisional plan (eventually abandoned) to follow Italianamerican with several more entries in a cycle devoted to American ethnic histories only confirms the perceived appeal of this material to a national audience in the mid-1970s.²

Jacobson’s wide-ranging analysis of the white ethnic revival in Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2006) includes a very brief and unsympathetic synopsis of Italianamerican’s main emphases and methods. “Italianamerican,” he notes, is among “the most complete fossilized records of [the 1970s’] impulse to recover ethnic heritage,” and he derisively compares Scorsese’s interviews with his parents to a college student’s “heritage hunt” (2006, 53). Because it was sanctioned by the state in the form of its NEH award and proposed by its producers as a contribution to the country’s Bicentennial festivities, Italianamerican is simply another vehicle for political meaning in Jacobson’s account. It establishes more evidence for the regeneration of ethnicity in the 1970s and its critical reversal of America’s earlier assimilationist or “melting pot” aspirations, of course; but as a consequence, Scorsese’s short documentary, like other popular works of its type, obscures a rather different national history of racial antagonisms and inequalities. According to Jacobson,

In the years beyond the melting pot there arose a new national myth of origins whose touchstone was Ellis Island, whose heroic central figure was the downtrodden but determined greenhorn, whose preferred modes of narration were the epic and the ode, and whose most far-reaching political conceit was the “nation of immigrants.”

(2006, 7)

In the candid and resourceful storytelling of its subjects, Italianamerican unreservedly describes this familiar tale of the immigrant’s odyssey to America at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the film’s unassuming stories, apparently personal and deeply rooted in the specific details of the Scorseses’ historical experiences, also signpost much wider developments in 1970s America. In other words, in the terms of Jacobson’s white ethnic revival, an embryonic nation of immigrants would definitively reach its new self-understanding through the reiteration of such ostensibly subjective parables.

Although he is exceedingly dismissive of Italianamerican, Jacobson’s attempt to situate Scorsese’s film in a more expansive historical context is constructive and worth pursuing further. This documentary might indeed appear “fossilized,” but only when it is fastened too firmly to the director’s ubiquitous “biographical legend” and the predominant terms of an auteurist discourse.³ Originally conceived as a commemorative endeavor, Italianamerican, like so much of Scorsese’s subsequent documentary output, was indelibly shaped by the ethnic revival’s pervasive language of reclamation: a desire to reconstruct, recuperate, regenerate, or retrieve an historical experience of immigration provided the primary motivation for the film’s production. But Italianamerican’s approach to its core historiographic commission reveals many meaningful differences from other more orthodox efforts to revivify ethnicity throughout the early-1970s. According to Les Keyser, Scorsese “wanted to nothing to do with a mundane, stereotypical account of Italians pouring off ocean liners, encountering Ellis Island, then crowding into Lower Manhattan” (1992, 1), and he would accept the NEH assignment only if he was permitted more latitude in determining Italianamerican’s form.⁴ One can easily imagine a version of the NEH’s projected documentary: abundant voice-over exposition, assorted archival moving images and photographs, retrospective testimony from a wide assortment of anonymous Italian immigrants, a narrative of hardships and eventual success, and so forth. But Italianamerican chooses instead to have its director’s second-generation Italian American parents respond to his questions and simply tell their life stories to a camera and crew of filmmakers in their Little Italy apartment, and the finished film makes only fleeting use of the iconographic imagery alluded to by Keyser. As a consequence, an especially expressive type of storytelling predominates throughout the film, as do the conspicuous repetitions of ceremonial undertakings (the telling of stories, cooking, eating, and talking at the dinner table) and the extemporaneous movements of subjects within the restricted space of the family’s apartment. Italianamerican might intermittently have the appearance of a “home movie gone mad” (Keyser 1992, 2), but its approach, that is, its conscious choices and circumvention of the ethnic revival’s fundamental prescriptions, should be understood in terms of its inception as an historical project: these choices are effectively interventions in the period’s broader commemorative activities; they are ultimately attempts to activate different historical materials within the setting of the decade’s wider ethnic revival.

Scorsese’s unwillingness to, as he puts it, “go back to 1901 with stock footage and a narrator saying, ‘In 1901’ …” (Kelly 1991, 17), implicitly acknowledges the disproportionate dispersion of certain kinds of images and movies during the 1970s, but it also indicates a deeper engagement with the assorted questions or problems of historiography, particularly as they relate to his documentary assignment. Indeed, his abandonment of the period’s accumulating iconography of European immigration should compel us to precisely distinguish Italianamerican’s perspective on the era’s widespread sense of ethnic renewal. Can we, for example, more accurately characterize this film’s originality as an account of Italian American history? Should we in fact understand Italianamerican as a commemoration and assessment of the 1970s ethnic revival? If conventionalized photographs in this period typically dispensed vernacular knowledge about the histories of immigration to America, Scorsese’s short film pointedly interrupts the immediacy of such imagery by concentrating on a substantially different task: it attends closely to its present-day storytellers’ embodied recollections; it highlights the smallest changes in their comportment, storytelling, and the velocity, intonation, and sound of their voices because these are keys to comprehending several less apparent features of the history in question. In this respect, Italianamerican resists one prevailing aspect of the ethnic revival, namely, its developing rendition of the immigrant experience as a set of archival images, and replaces it with another of the era’s characteristic historiographic tendencies: the construction of social “histories from below” and their attendant reliance upon oral accounts of the past. According to Alessandro Portelli, the tonality and “volume range and the rhythm of popular speech carry implicit meaning and social connotations” (1998, 65), and these should be differentiated from other modes of conveying historical experience such as writing or the abundant “stock footage” mentioned by Scorsese. In other words, the “tone,” “volume range,” and “rhythm” of idiomatic communication establish a foundation for any oral history. Italianamerican’s methodical attentiveness to popular speech and storytelling, the deportment of its principal storytellers, and the self-reflexive conduct of its interviews indicate how the film’s final form comprises a critical apprehension of the era’s ethnic renaissance. In Jacobson’s brief account, Italianamerican seems to be little more than an ossified relic, but the film can be more usefully understood as an active reassessment of the ethnic revival’s central predispositions as well as its accompanying historiography. Although it is not the director’s first experience with documentary filmmaking, Italianamerican effectively represents Scorsese’s true “beginning” as a documentarian dedicated to rendering accounts of the historical past. In many ways, the film initiates the director’s longstanding preservationist efforts, but only insofar as it apprehends such work in the identifiable idiom of “recovery.” Edward Said has helpfully distinguished “beginnings” from “origins,” describing the former as “first step[s] in the intentional production of meaning” (1975, 5). Italianamerican’s perceptive and focused participation in the period’s ethnic resurgence, I want to suggest, establishes precisely this kind of meaningful “beginning” for Scorsese’s documentary production.

In what follows, I return to Italianamerican and its exhausted follow-up, American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978), and I closely examine their shared approach to meeting the various challenges of rendering historical accounts on film during this period. Collected in sense memories and storytelling deportment, history in these two films is consistently drawn from their narrators’ lucid documentation of a wide range of retrospective signposts. Effectively dispensing with the iconographic archival resources alluded to above, Italianamerican’s approach implies a substantial compatibility between the Scorseses’ artless storytelling—their natural comportment, gestures, and vernacular rendering of historical accounts—and the larger social history of Italian immigration to America at the onset of the twentieth century. American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, in many ways an extended and apprehensive epilogue to Italianamerican, assumes this same approach in order to register the termination of the Scorseses’ optimistic stories of arrival—and cautious assimilation—in the new world. As a consequence, the films’ storytellers come to function as conspicuous intercessors for the historical past: their particular narration of assorted anecdotes intervenes decisively in the films’ interpretations of the histories in question. In other words, the Scorseses’ and Prince’s increasingly communicative storytelling grasps a meaningful dimension of the past and discloses a very different generational attunement to the films’ broader story of migration to America. As we’ll see, Italianamerican and American Boy finally catalog a set of externalized thoughts and emotions whose source is a substantial relation to the historical experience of immigration to America. In Antonio Gramsci’s familiar formulation, the “starting point of critical elaboration” is a developing self-consciousness, or an awareness of oneself “as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in [oneself] an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory” (1971, 324). In Scorsese’s Italianamerican and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, we can perceive the framework for this type of self-consciously critical inventory, and our attendant efforts to clarify and characterize each figure’s unique storytelling, that is to say, our determination to recognize the films’ accumulating assemblage of historical traces, are what ultimately direct our comprehension of their perspectives on the past as history. Simply put, Italianamerican’s (and American Boy’s) adoption of this amalgam of observational and participatory methods distinguishes it from the NEH’s projected expository approach, and it is the key to understanding Scorsese’s particular rendering of historical accounts.⁵

Emotions in the Emulsion: Italianamerican and American Documentary in the 1970s

Although it was plainly conceived as the first of Scorsese’s self-described “smaller projects” (Christie and Thompson 2003, 113), Italianamerican continues to figure prominently in interviews with the director. He has on occasion provocatively called it “the best film I ever made” (Kelly 1991, 17), but more often he describes this unpretentious short documentary as an experimental laboratory for his subsequent fiction filmmaking explorations. In other words, Italianamerican’s permanent value is repeatedly said to reside in the instructive solutions it establishes for the close cognate problems of fiction filmmaking:

We shot medium shots of people talking [in Italianamerican], and intercut with some music over stills of them. To me it seemed very, very strong. It smashed all those preconceptions about what a film should look like and how a film should be presented. It also freed me in a sense. It streamlined the style for Taxi Driver. And in Raging Bull, we didn’t give a damn. We didn’t care about transitions, really. What I should say is, we didn’t care about artful transitions.

(Kelly 1991, 18; emphasis in original)

In this and many other similarly retrospective assessments, Scorsese values the Italianamerican experiment primarily for its embryonic challenges to conventional filmmaking—its unvarnished compositions, its recourse to a small number of set-ups and simple editing strategies, its informal deployment of music and sounds—and the apparently easy transferability of such methods to his fiction work.⁶ The renewal of Scorsese’s non-fiction film practice since 1995, however, has been accompanied by intermittent reflections upon these same issues, along with several unexpectedly speculative assertions about the blurred boundary between documentary and fiction filmmaking, their typically knotted reciprocity, and most significantly, Italianamerican’s pivotal influence on his approach to working with actors in the much more familiar Hollywood setting. For example, in a wide-ranging interview about documentary filmmaking with longtime collaborator, Raffaele Donato, Scorsese further develops his previous ideas about Italianamerican’s long-lasting lessons, particularly those gleaned from the experience of...