The research bench
Axis of Action is the field guide — the finished map of the codes and conventions of film. This is the bench behind it: a viewing journal, and the working notes it throws off. Notes are small, dense with links, and always cite their sources. Follow anything.
Now watching
- After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.
Recently watched
- The Craft (1996) Four girls at a Catholic school in Los Angeles form a coven, get everything they asked for, and discover that the film has a moral. The teen movie the 1990s kept trying to make about female anger.
- Taxi Driver (1976) A returned soldier drives nights through a city he wants to wash away. Scorsese's first acknowledged masterpiece — and the strongest example here of point of view doing the work of an argument.
Four ways in
Short trails through the notes. Each one is an argument, not a category.
How a film decides who you side with
Allegiance is engineered, and it can be handed from one character to another mid-film without the audience noticing the transfer.
When the censor becomes the stylist
Two films, two ratings fights, and two constraints that got praised afterwards as artistic choices.
Who actually wrote this film?
Taxi Driver has at least three authors and they describe three different films. A useful corrective to auteurist reflex.
Where Scorsese's style came from
Handheld because tracks cost time, records because there was no score, red because of Michael Powell. "The economics dictated the style."
The spine
The notes the rest of the wiki leans on hardest — counted, not chosen. The number is how many other notes point here.
- 34 source Scorsese on Scorsese (1989) The director's own account, film by film, assembled from interviews. Intention straight from the source — with the usual caveats.
- 29 scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
- 26 source Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art The standard textbook. Where this wiki's definitions default to when nothing fancier is needed.
- 22 source Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese Aaron Baker (ed.) (Wiley Blackwell)
- 22 source Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey Mary Pat Kelly (Hachette Books, 1991)
- 20 context Commerce The money context: who pays, what they expect back, and how both shape the text — in production and in reception.
- 19 film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.
- 19 film Psycho (1960) Hitchcock's cheap, fast, black-and-white shocker — the richest single text for teaching codes, conventions and contexts.
- 19 source Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert Roger Ebert
- 18 context Values The social and cultural context: whose stories count, what audiences assume, and how both drift over time.
- 18 source Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies Giannetti's survey: opinionated, quotable, and the library's best source for what a technique feels like rather than what it is called.
- 17 concept Colour Palette as meaning, and the argument over whether colour speaks by instinct or by rules a film teaches in its first minutes.