The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1978-99

Authorship and Context II

L. Grist

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781403920355
• eBook ISBN: 9781137302045
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A detailed, theoretically attuned analysis of all of the Scorsese-directed features from The Last Waltz to Bringing Out the Dead. Grist illuminates Scorsese's authorship, but also reflects back upon a range of informing contexts.

1

Evolving Authorship, Developing Contexts: ‘Life Lessons’

I

This book is a follow-up to The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1963–77: Authorship and Context. Covering all of the Scorsese-directed feature films released between 1978 and 1999, and making supplementary reference to Scorsese’s other work, it centres, like its predecessor, on a series of theoretically attuned textual analyses. Once more, these analyses are articulated in relation not only to Scorsese’s authorship, but to a range of informing contexts – industrial, institutional, generic, historical and/or cultural – that reflect back upon, and differently inflect, both Scorsese’s authorship and, implicitly, the issue and potentiality of film authorship in general. Hence, again, the book’s subtitle: authorship and context.

Near indivisible from the propounding of film authorship, auteurism is a critical practice that seeks to obtain meaning from a group of films through the examination of stylistic and thematic elements that can be related to mainly a single creative figure, usually their director. Reciprocally, for most auteurist approaches not only is a film more likely to be of value if it is controlled by its director, but for a director to be considered an auteur – or author – his or her work has to show a stylistic and, above all, thematic consistency. As a critical practice, moreover, auteurism has exhibited an acceptance and integration of challenges and contradictions seemingly undermining of its validity and, through this, sought to position itself on a firmer theoretical grounding. More especially, there can be charted a movement away from a common Romantic essentialism to an acknowledgement of material factors that would appear to mitigate against the possibility of the ascription of individual authorship within what is, particularly when considering commercial film industries like Hollywood, a collaborative, labour-intensive, technologically determined, variably regulated, frequently generic and predominantly audience-orientated medium. Witness the now familiarly drawn trajectory of auteurism as it is described as traversing a route from its instigation as a distinct critical practice by la politique des auteurs of Cahiers du cinéma, via the work associated with Movie in the UK, with Andrew Sarris in the USA and the detour that was auteur-structuralism, to the apparently safe haven offered, critically and theoretically, by post-structuralism.¹

It is the alignment of auteurism with post-structuralism that provides the conception of film authorship operative within this study. For post-structuralism, films – no less than the individual or the broader social formation – constitute ‘a structured play of forces, relations and discourses’ (Caughie 1981b: 1), each of which are a product of distinct material conjunctures. Instead of a film being considered as the site of a single, discrete meaning, it is postulated as a text formed by multiple structuring elements that cross its body offering different configurations of meaning, none of which comprises a definitive statement. Within this idea of film as text, authorship itself becomes a discourse: an historically determined semiotic subset. Framing authorship as a discourse has a number of critical benefits. Discourse is never neutral or innocent, but invariably seeks ideological effect, to address, influence and position. Authorship regarded as a discourse thus embraces both repeated authorial concerns and how these concerns are represented and weighted, thereby marrying – with apt auteurist consistency – the thematic and the stylistic.² Analysis of authorship as a discourse, as it centres on its textual inscription, also occludes pointless dispute over what is ‘intended’ or ‘unconscious’. Beyond such, there can be proposed a model of film authorship wherein, while the fact of stylistic and thematic links between films associated with many directors is admitted, any film text remains a complex structured by multiple determinants. Indeed, authorship is likely to be multiple rather than single, attributable not just to the director but to the input of other involved personnel. Any of a text’s elements can be separated and analysed in isolation or in combination with any of the others, but each mutually inflects and is inflected by the text’s other elements to afford a specific collocation of meanings and affects. Further, as each film text is the product of particular historical, material circumstances, so too are the contours and emphases, and the placing and efficacy, of its authorial discourses.³

This brings us to context. The preceding volume traced Scorsese’s authorial discourse as it emerged and developed specifically within a heterogeneity of production practices and more broadly in relation to New Hollywood Cinema: that phase of art cinema-influenced, variously oppositional filmmaking that, arising at a time of acute social, cultural and political contestation and institutional uncertainty, enjoyed an uneven flourishing within and on the fringes of the mainstream from the mid- to late 1960s to the mid- to late 1970s.⁴ It also, consistent with its art cinema antecedents, introduced within Hollywood a self-conscious auteur cinema.

Contextualizing Scorsese’s filmmaking since 1977 demands recognition of sundry differences. The decline of New Hollywood Cinema is inseparable from interlocking institutional, cultural, ideological, political and epistemological changes that became increasingly apparent as the 1970s became the 1980s. Institutionally the uncertainty that prompted the financing of such filmmaking was annulled upon the majors’ corporate rationalization; culturally, ideologically and politically contestation, and attendant Left-Liberal social and legislative progress, was derailed by a hegemonic shift to the Right; while epistemologically, as modernity shaded into postmodernity, so formally and ideologically questioning modernism became replaced by formally and ideologically quietistic postmodernism – all of which finds condensation in the space allowed New Hollywood Cinema becoming squeezed by an emphasis on blockbuster-cum-high-concept cinema. In turn, the big-budget box-office flops that – including New York, New York (Scorsese, 1977) – sped the death of New Hollywood Cinema look retrospectively like films caught between contrasting institutional imperatives.

Yet having seemingly faced institutional obsolescence by the mid-1980s, Scorsese has subsequently maintained a manifest, if uneasy, accommodation with Hollywood, the terms of which have been institutionally and historically contingent, varying both across and within projects. It has been an accommodation aided by the widespread cultural acceptance of the notion of film authorship and, ironically, his cultivation of a particular star image: that of a ‘personal’, New York filmmaker somewhat at odds with the Hollywood institution.⁵ Although economic considerations remain preponderant for the Hollywood majors, they have never been averse to financing films of less than definite economic potential that might garner aesthetic and critical reputation and prestige within both the industry and the broader culture and, through this, alleviate the still negative perception of much of their product. The widespread embrace of film authorship has also yielded the majors material benefit as a means of selling films. In this ironies multiply. For while Hollywood has marginalized auteur cinema, its selling of films via author name has led to a profligate and often nominal attribution of directorial authorship that, as reflected in variations of the ‘A film by …’ credit, and largely lacking any critical or industrial substantiation, has for Richard Maltby rendered authorship in Hollywood ‘a commercially beneficial fiction’ (2003: 49). Not dissimilarly, Timothy Corrigan has proclaimed the auteur as now dominantly ‘a commercial strategy for organizing audience reception’, that auteurs’ ‘commercial status as auteurs is their chief function as auteurs’ (1991: 103, 105).

Corrigan’s arguments have been influential,⁶ and have a generalized pertinence, but they are also concerned less with authorship per se than with authorial star image.⁷ Admittedly, authorial star images and authorial discourses are rarely utterly discrete, yet neither are they the same thing, having different loci and purposes. Authorial star images reside variably across the cinematic institution, authorial discourses specifically within film texts: authorial discourses are involved primarily with expression, authorial star images with financial exchange. Accordingly, for Corrigan to note that ‘institutional and commercial agencies define auteurism almost exclusively as publicity and advertisement’ (1991: 106) is to state the obvious, and while an authorial star image can, as it ‘precedes and succeeds’ a film text, usurp ‘the work of that text and its reception’ (102, 106), this depends on how the text is read. Too often Scorsese’s films have been read through his star image, with the emphasis on his being a personal filmmaker being translated into reductive biographical interpretations. Moreover, not only is there commonly a disjunction between Scorsese’s in part self-pronounced star image, and his related comments about his films, and the films as texts, but he has conceded that his stress on the personal can be strategic: ‘I just sometimes talk that way because you try to convince everyone that you’re serious about the work you’re doing’ (Wootton 1987: 92).

This is not to claim that Scorsese’s filmmaking is not personal, or that it lacks biographical reference. But the personal and the biographical are more usefully conceived of in terms of motive rather than point, as factors that inform the films’ frequent intensity of expression and involved willingness to work through the often unsettling and layered connotations of what they represent. The films are, as Scorsese implies, most personal in their attempted or achieved seriousness. Such a perception of Scorsese’s filmmaking stands at odds with Corrigan’s assertion that ‘the commercial conditioning’ of the ‘figure’ of the auteur ‘has successfully evacuated it of most of its expressive power and textual coherence’ (1991: 135), as does the proposition, which underpins this study, that Scorsese’s films can be argued to present the stylistic and thematic consistency that has been regarded historically to be constitutive of the auteur. That stated, the films that this book focuses upon both demonstrate a stylistic and thematic extension of Scorsese’s previous work and present certain different concerns and emphases that reflect back upon, and re-inflect, those apparent earlier. For instance, stylistically, as Scorsese’s filmmaking maintains a modernist remit, they not infrequently partake of a condensed, expressly filmic and reflexive mode of signification, while thematically, where the issue of cultural determination remains important, there is an increasing engagement with matters of politics and class.

To a degree this bears out the conventional auteurist notion of creative evolution, although it needs to be considered less in regard of linear, individual development than conjuncturally, in relation to – once more – particular material circumstances. Similarly, while the modulations apparent within Scorsese’s authorial discourse have a suggestive reference to Scorsese biographically as a working-class (and latterly working-class identified), Italian-American, film-school educated filmmaker who personally and professionally intersected with 1960s counter- and political protest cultures, such, and other biographical intimations, require to be seen less as a Romantic expression of self than as indicative of a peculiar acculturation: with respect to which, the continued thematic concern with determination has an immanent conceptual resonance. It is, moreover, in terms of the author as acculturated individual that the biographical has been returned to the debate attending film authorship. There has been proposed a politics of identification offered by some authors defined according to sexual orientation, gender and/or race that has been positioned as a corrective to the silencing theoretically of marginal ‘voices’ by the proclamation, following Roland Barthes (1968), of the death of the author at the very historical moment those voices were beginning to speak ‘more loudly’ (Staiger 2003: 29).⁸ In turn, the writer can but admit a personal investment in and identification with Scorsese as a male heterosexual filmmaker of a contiguous generation, with similar cultural points of reference and from a working-class background. However, it should also be remembered that the author as constructed through auteurist analysis is, while associated with a biographical source, a critical construct and that this construct is reciprocally informed by its analytical perspective, is shaped, to evoke Jacques Lacan, by the desire of the analyst (1973: 158–60). Whatever its ideological efficacy, this politics of identification is, besides, nothing new, but has been implicit throughout the history of auteurism as a critical practice: compare the early auteurist interest in directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Robert Aldrich, whose films’ representation of a diversely troubled, stoic and hard-bitten masculinity has a perceptible desirous pertinence for the predominantly young, male and bourgeois critics involved.

Auteurism can better be considered as establishing difference amid the generality of film production. A notion that remains most pronounced in Sarris’s auteurist mapping of American cinema (1968), authorship as difference has broader cultural and ideological reverberations apropos of the institutional acceptance and rejection of auteur cinema that partnered the adoption and abandonment of New Hollywood Cinema. For if the fact of auteur cinema has a nagging consonance with the fracturing of ideological consensus and the institutional shakiness that was its enabling context, then its recuperation coheres with the coincident reassertion of Right-wing dominance and institutional stability. However, Scorsese’s subsequent accommodation with Hollywood and his filmmaking’s latter development inhabit a more complex articulation of the ideological and the institutional. On one hand, as the 1980s became the 1990s there was discernible an ideological movement away from the reactionariness that had ensured the election and marked the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, a shift that obtained concrete political expression in the election as president in 1992 of one William Jefferson Clinton. On the other, during the same period Hollywood’s power increased exponentially, a situation that mutually fuelled and was fuelled by its diversification into areas previously comparatively uncolonized, this whether defined, in accord with broader economic developments, globally or in terms of the cinematic institution. Correspondingly, Hollywood’s rapprochement with Scorsese’s filmmaking has been a function of its refound institutional strength, and not, as during its preceding flirtation with auteur cinema, weakness, the ramifications of which have been manifold.

In discussing Scorsese’s work from 1978 to 1999, from The Last Waltz to Bringing Out the Dead, this book will thus seek not only to elucidate the considered films, and through this to demonstrate the theoretically sustainable relevance of the notion of film authorship, but to reflect upon Hollywood cinema and its historical location from the late 1970s to the start of the new millennium. Like its predecessor it seeks to be about authorship and context. As before, the analyses of the films will be founded upon a combination of formalist, psychoanalytic and ideological approaches.

II

‘Life Lessons’, the Scorsese-directed segment of the episode film New York Stories (Scorsese, Francis Coppola and Woody Allen, 1989), offers a concentrated (43-minute) exemplification of Scorsese’s authorial discourse. As such, it enables the introduction of a number of matters germane to this study. It likewise illustrates the need to consider films as individual – and individually, materially determined – texts, and not just chapters in an oeuvre, a factor that has further shaped this book’s conception.

The episode film has a quite extensive cinematic history. It has recurred periodically within Hollywood, as witness, say, O. Henry’s Full House (Henry Hathaway, Henry King, Howard Hawks, Henry Koster and Jean Negulesco, 1952) or Twilight Zone: The Movie (John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and George Miller, 1983), as well as within post-Second World War European mainstream and art cinema. Moreover, while within episode films single segments, whatever the films’ provenance, are commonly linked through theme, situation and/or source, art cinema examples mitigate and compound that cinema’s textual and commercial emphasis on the auteur by presenting projects frequently predicated upon film movements or in terms of co-production. Thus the nouvelle vague-related Paris vu par .../Six in Paris (Jean Douchet, Jean Rouch, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, 1965), or the French-Italian Histoires extraordinaires/Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini, 1968). Such collocations of talent contrastingly bespeak economic concerns often unacknowledged by the art cinema institution; correspondingly, the usual involvement of auteurs and/or name directors is both disavowed and proclaimed.

New York Stories originated with Allen, who first thought of making a film comprising three sections written and directed by himself. On the suggestion of producer Robert Greenhut, consideration was given to combining one section directed by Allen with others directed by Fellini and Ingmar Bergman. This maintained the association of episode films with art cinema, but was a threesome discounted as uneconomic within an American context because of language problems. American collaborators were sought. Late in 1986 Allen contacted Scorsese and Spielberg, who because of other filmmaking commitments was replaced by Coppola.⁹ So reconstituted, the project invokes Hollywood’s commercial endorsement of authorship, this while it follows its art cinema antecedents in mitigating while compounding its authorial reference.

Few restrictions were placed on the filmmakers apart from setting their segment in New York. Such freedom recalls Allen’s inimitable relationship with first United Artists and then Orion: as long as Allen’s films were produced for a comparatively low but never specified figure, he was granted virtual creative autonomy. Orion nevertheless passed on the opportunity to finance and distribute New York Stories. While in hindsight this possibly reflected financial problems at Orion, which went bust in 1992, it also attests to the at best variable performance of episode films at the American box office. In early 1987 Scorsese mentioned the project to Jeffrey Katzenberg, then Chairman of Walt Disney Pictures. Touchstone Pictures, Disney’s adult film subsidiary, had financed The Color of Money (Scorsese, 1986), and ‘had been negotiating’ with Allen ‘to work for them’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Evolving Authorship, Developing Contexts: ‘Life Lessons’
• 2: Scorsese and Documentary: The Last Waltz
• 3: Masculinity, Violence, Resistance: Raging Bull
• 4: Back to Travis #1: The King of Comedy
• 5: Adventures in Reagan and Bush Sr’s USA: The Color of Money and GoodFellas
• 6: Yuppies in Peril: After Hours and Cape Fear
• 7: Religion, Blasphemy and the Hollywood Institution: The Last Temptation of Christ
• 8: Style, Narrative, Adaptation: The Age of Innocence
• 9: Power and the Look: Casino
• 10: Cinema of Transcendence, Cinema as Transcendence: Kundun
• 11: Back to Travis #2: Bringing Out the Dead
• 12: Conclusion: ‘Of course, there’s less time …’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index