A Companion to Martin Scorsese

Aaron Baker

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781119685623, 9781444338614
• eBook ISBN: 9781118588369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Companion to Martin Scorsese

A Companion to Martin Scorsese

"This valuable book brings the exceptional scale of Martin Scorsese's film work into clear view. His achievements are monumental, and the essays collected in this work provide wonderfully detailed and vivid analyses of his oeuvre. A comprehensive study of the most exciting filmmaker working today."
Robert Burgoyne, University of St Andrews

A Companion to Martin Scorsese, Revised Edition is a comprehensive collection of original essays assessing the career of one of America's most prominent contemporary filmmakers. The first reference work of its kind, this book contains contributions from influential scholars in North America and Europe. The essays use a variety of analytic approaches to study numerous aspects of Scorsese's work, from his earliest films to his place within the history of American and world cinema. They consider his work in relation to auteur theory, the genres in which he has worked, his use of popular music, and his recent involvement with film preservation. Several of the essays offer fresh interpretations of some of Scorsese's most influential films, including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, Gangs of New York, Hugo, and The Irishman. Others take a broader approach and discuss the representation of violence, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, race, and other themes across his work. With insights that will interest film scholars as well as movie enthusiasts, this is an important contribution to the scholarship of contemporary American cinema.

Part One
The Pious Auteur

1
How Scorsese Became Scorsese
A Historiography of New Hollywood’s Most Prestigious Auteur

Marc Raymond

There are few filmmakers in the world more well known than Martin Scorsese, which makes writing any kind of overview of his work especially difficult. Scorsese’s biographical history is by now very familiar to the culture, as are many of his films, and there seems little debate that Scorsese is a supremely talented and historically important director. Thus, what I’d like to offer is a kind of revisionist look at his biography, or, perhaps, a historiography of Scorsese’s biographical history. How has the Scorsese narrative been developed, and why has the story been told this way? Connected to this, what has been left out by this particular approach? This chapter aims to both give an overview of Scorsese’s vast and impressive work as well as offer a review and critique of the critical literature on Scorsese to this point.

Scorsese was born in November 1942 in New York’s Little Italy, and his Italian-Catholic identity has been emphasized in numerous studies. As a child, he suffered from asthma, which prevented him from physical activity and led to his love of cinema. This biographical detail does contextualize Scorsese, but from a very personal perspective. What is often overlooked is the importance of where and when Scorsese came of age. If the French Cinematheque and postwar social conditions gave birth to the French New Wave auteurs, New York of the 1950s certainly contributed to the filmmaker Scorsese would become. Within the history of cinema exhibition, it can be argued that there is no time and place quite as rich and varied, and almost certainly not in America. The apex of Classic Hollywood was reached by 1946, and it was already beginning its decline as Scorsese reached film-going maturity. But this led to Hollywood experimenting with different styles and formats (color, widescreen), so that the 1950s can be seen as a Golden Age aesthetically if not commercially. And as Hollywood was in decline and closing theaters, the art-house cinema circuit was just beginning, with New York as the epicenter (see Wilinsky, 2001). Even local television, often considered the enemy of film, added to Scorsese’s education by replaying old Hollywood films and, more importantly, films from the Italian Neorealism movement. As Scorsese explains in his 1999 documentary, My Voyage to Italy, his large extended family would often watch these rather terrible prints of such classics as Paisan (Roberto Rosselini, 1946) and La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1947) on local Italian television, and despite the poor quality the impact was still felt. Without this particular convergence of forces, it is highly unlikely a cinematic outlier like Scorsese would have emerged.

This extends to Scorsese’s formal education in cinema. Across the United States in the 1960s, more and more children were attending university, including many who came from working-class backgrounds. At the same time, film programs were opening and expanding rapidly, as the 1960s explosion of world cinema created widespread demand in what was now considered the most important art form of the twentieth century. Scorsese entered New York University (NYU) in 1962 and eventually moved into the Film department, completing his master’s degree in 1966. He made two acclaimed short films, What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? and It’s Not Just You, Murray, both of which are hybrid works combining elements of popular entertainment such as Hollywood and vaudeville with a playful, New Wave sensibility. They are calling cards, not unlike the numerous independent films that flood film festivals today. The only truly experimental work Scorsese has made was 1967’s The Big Shave, a short completed outside of NYU with financial support from Jacques Ledoux, curator of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels. The resulting six-minute short was not only Scorsese’s most experimental work but also his most overtly political. The differences between this film and Scorsese’s earlier shorts can be related to their differing institutional contexts. Scorsese did not produce The Big Shave within the academic institution, and the film differs dramatically from those earlier shorts. Rather than being a New Wave exercise in Hollywood revision, The Big Shave exists as a narrative in only the barest sense: an unknown man shaves in front of a mirror in an all-white room until he cuts himself and is covered in blood, all to the tune of Bunny Berigan’s version of “I Can’t Get Started.” The film then ends with two title cards: “Whiteness by Herman Melville” and “Viet’67.” The film won the Prix L’Age d’Or at the Festival of Experimental Cinema in Belgium and belongs to what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as a field of restricted production (see Bourdieu, 1993), a field Scorsese would abandon when he chose a career in Hollywood.

Also coming out of the NYU context is Scorsese’s first feature film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, aka Bring on the Dancing Girls, I Call First, and J.R. Originating in 1965 as a master’s thesis film, it would evolve with multiple titles over the next few years, reaching its final form in 1969 with the addition of a nude scene, dictated by a distributor but fitting thematically with the original film. It marked Scorsese’s first attempt at, as Leighton Grist puts it, “entering the marketplace, (and) developing a style” (Grist, 2000: 24). Subsequent writing on the film, which is rather substantial compared with the writing on the short films, emphasizes the work as an apprenticeship for the masterpiece to come, Mean Streets (1973), and hence judges the film in relation to this more professional standard: “Who’s That Knocking at My Door presents a patchwork of jerky transitions, unintegrated stylistic contrasts and varying standards of cinematography and picture quality” (Grist, 2000: 31). Grist’s comments represent a wide consensus on the film as technically crude because Scorsese still had not learned to “properly” channel his talent. This critical community shares the conviction that great filmmaking negotiates between the two extremes of Hollywood and the avant-garde. It is in this aesthetic, which will become increasingly popular throughout the years, that Scorsese’s reputation will be built.

For a different perspective, consider former NYU and Scorsese student Peter Rea’s illuminating comments on both films:

I think Who’s That Knocking has some of the most creative things he’s ever done. I think it blows away Mean Streets. The use of slow motion when it is going across the people laughing, and, I just think there are things in that movie that are so powerful. I mean he’s jump-cutting, he’s playing with the medium and having fun with it. Of course, I think Mean Streets is great as well. I went to L.A. after NYU, I was there for a brief period of time, and he (Scorsese) was cutting Mean Streets. And one of his other students was there working on it as well. So I saw an early cut of it. I saw a lot of stuff that I thought was amazing, but they cut out of the movie. Kind of outrageous stuff, dream sequences. (author’s interview)

Rea, as primarily a filmmaker and a production teacher, appreciates very different aspects of Scorsese’s work than those within the academic interpretative community because he belongs to this field of cultural production himself. The changes in style from Who’s That Knocking at My Door to Mean Streets are best considered not as a maturation (which implies a clear hierarchy) but as a shift in the type of audience that appreciates each respective work. The vagaries of production and distribution that are used to denigrate Who’s That Knocking at My Door apply equally to Mean Streets or any other work of art: “Since most artists want the advantages of distribution, they work with an eye to what the system characteristic of their world can handle. What kinds of work will it distribute? What will it ignore? What return will it give for what kind of work?” (Becker, 1982: 94). With this in mind, it is useful to compare the two films with the reception of John Cassavetes’s Shadows, a film that went through two different versions and thus can be considered as two separate texts. The first cut of the film, which unfortunately is no longer available to be screened, was praised by Jonas Mekas as a great example of underground cinema and was used by Mekas to promote the idea of a New American Cinema. However, when Cassavetes re-edited the film in order to de-emphasize formal experimentation and focus more on characterization, Mekas rejected the film as overly conventional. For Cassavetes, the second version represented a maturation of his filmmaking, rejecting the overindulgence in cinematic style of the first version. A similar split in critical perspective is seen with Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Mean Streets. The later film may be more mature, but it is also more widely acceptable and intelligible in terms of style. To place this opposition within a hierarchy, as most critics of the two films have, works well as an auteurist narrative of growth, but also justifies and defends a certain approach to cinema (namely Hollywood, however “New”) while rejecting another (experimental). Throughout his career, Scorsese’s work will repeatedly be used to mediate different ideas and notions of what cinema should be. And although Scorsese is often seen as an outsider to Hollywood, this mediation usually takes the form of an implicit justification of its approach to cinema.

A failed project from this period also has served to reinforce this narrative. Scorsese’s first “professional” directing job actually took place two years before his move to Hollywood and four years before his directing job for Roger Corman, Boxcar Bertha (1972). In 1968, Scorsese was hired to direct The Honeymoon Killers, scripted by Leonard Castle. But after a week of shooting, Scorsese was fired from the job and replaced by Castle himself. The film was released in 1970 and has developed a significant cult following, eventually being released by the prestigious Criterion Collection DVD company. Scorsese’s comments on this incident reveal a great deal about the cultural field of filmmaking:

I had been fired from The Honeymoon Killers in 1968 after one week’s shooting, and for a pretty good reason too. It was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
• Title page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction Artistic Solutions to Sociological Problems Aaron Baker
• Part One The Pious Auteur
• Part Two Social Contexts and Conflicts
• Part Three Form and the Filmmaking Process
• Part Four Major Films
• Index
• End User License Agreement