Everything

Every written note, newest first. The 39 further books indexed from the Reel library are listed separately.

source Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films Boggs and Petrie's classroom text: plain analytical questions, a working glossary, and the flat/round and static/dynamic character pairs.
source Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) The New Hollywood chronicle: how the directors briefly took over the studios, told through interviews and gossip.
source Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art The standard textbook. Where this wiki's definitions default to when nothing fancier is needed.
source Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006) Ellen Burstyn's memoir: the Alice collaboration from the side of the star who commissioned it.
source Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts Hayward's dictionary of film theory: the shelf's voice for the ideological reading of every convention.
source Criterion — At Home in the World The Criterion release essay on Alice: production history, the prologue fight, and the film's place in 1974.
source Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft The Dianic priestess hired to make the rituals plausible — who invented a fake goddess so that teenagers could not invoke a real one.
source Dunne on After Hours (2024) Griffin Dunne, star and co-producer, on the ending they nearly shot, Geffen's reaction, Michael Powell's fix, and SoHo as 'uncharted territory'.
source Durgnat — A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002) A shot-by-shot, scene-by-scene reading of the whole film. The model for what a maximal close reading looks like.
source Ebert — Alice review (1974) A first-run review: what a sympathetic 1974-75 critic saw before the film had a reputation.
source Ebert — The Craft review (1996) Two stars. Ebert liked the four actresses and thought the film wasted them on special effects and revenge.
source Stuart Hall — Encoding/Decoding Eleven pages that gave audience study its vocabulary: encoding, decoding, and the three reading positions.
source Stuart Hall — Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices The constructionist account of representation, and the chapter on stereotyping that most of the wiki's Values work rests on.
source Kael — Mean Streets review (1973) Pauline Kael's New Yorker review, the one that made the film: 'a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking.'
source The history of "light as a feather, stiff as a board" Samuel Pepys recorded the levitation game in the 1660s. The physics are dull and the ritual is not.
source Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film Barsam and Monahan: the most current of the introductions, strong on sound, genre as industry, and the MacGuffin.
source O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society The Australian media studies textbook. The closest thing on the shelf to the wiki's own framework, in a VCE-shaped vocabulary.
source Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) The essay that named the male gaze. Sixteen pages that reorganised film theory.
source David Bordwell — Narration in the Fiction Film Bordwell's theory of narration. Only the Soviet montage chapter is in the library — read the shelf mark before citing.
source Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema The standard one-volume history. Where to go when a film needs its industry, its movement or its decade.
source Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021) The A.V. Club interview in which True describes the character being rewritten around race, and why she played the hair spell differently from everyone else.
source Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990) The production history. Where nearly every behind-the-scenes claim about Psycho should be checked.
source Robinson and Dunne on After Hours (2023) The producers of After Hours on the director they had before Scorsese: a Disney animator called Tim Burton.
source Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert Roger Ebert
source Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese Aaron Baker (ed.) (Wiley Blackwell)
source Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey Mary Pat Kelly (Hachette Books, 1991)
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.
source Christopher Kenworthy — Shoot Like Scorsese Christopher Kenworthy (Michael Wiese Productions)
source Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing Reisz and Millar, 1953: an editor's book, still the sharpest thing in the library on why a cut is there at all.
source Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966) The book-length interview. Hitchcock's own theory of directing the audience, in his own words.
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.
source Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media Bruce Block's practitioner's grammar of the image: contrast and affinity, the visual components, and story structure drawn as a graph.
person Michael Ballhaus Fassbinder's cameraman, who came to New York and taught Scorsese to shoot sixteen set-ups a day. After Hours was their first film together; Goodfellas and The Departed came later.
person Michael Powell The director of The Red Shoes and Peeping Tom, rescued from obscurity by Scorsese, married to his editor, and a standing note-giver on his films: too much red, the wrong gloves, and the ending of After Hours.
person Robert De Niro Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The actor whose rewrites and rehearsal-room inventions are all over both films, often more than the credits admit.
scene After Hours — back at work A plaster statue falls out of a burglars' van at dawn, cracks open, and the man inside walks through the gates of his office and sits down at his terminal. Rescue or sentence? The film was shot without an ending, and it shows the seams on purpose.
scene After Hours — the diner A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.
scene After Hours — the keys A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
scene The Craft — light as a feather Four girls, a chant, and a body that rises. The best sequence in the film contains no special effect at all — only rhythm, faces and a cut.
scene The Craft — Nancy's turn Fairuza Balk gets everything she asked for and the film changes its mind about her. The best performance in it, in service of the argument it loses.
scene Mean Streets — the back room Charlie tells Johnny Boy he has to pay. Johnny Boy tells him a story about a poker game, a raid and a man called Joey Clams, and loses the thread himself. Everyone agrees it's the heart of the film. Nobody agrees who wrote it.
scene Mean Streets — the opening A voice in the dark, a man who cannot stay asleep, and a Ronettes record that lands on the downbeat as his head hits the pillow. The film's argument and its method before the first title.
scene Mean Streets — Tony's bar Charlie walks into a room lit like hell in slow motion; later Johnny Boy walks in on the downbeat of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' with a girl on each arm. Two entrances, one room, and the camera's opinion of both.
scene Psycho — the opening A crane over Phoenix, captions stamping time and place, then in through a half-open window. The audience enters as a trespasser.
scene Psycho — the parlour scene Norman and Marion eat sandwiches while the mise en scène quietly explains the entire film.
scene Psycho — the shower scene Three minutes, dozens of cuts, no knife ever shown entering flesh. Violence assembled entirely in the audience's head.
scene Taxi Driver — the mirror "You talkin' to me?" — the most quoted line in the film is not in the film's script. De Niro wrote it standing up, in a derelict building, over traffic noise.
scene Taxi Driver — the phone call Travis begs Betsy down a payphone and the camera walks away from him, into an empty corridor. Scorsese thought of this shot first and filmed it last.
scene Taxi Driver — the shoot-out Three men dead in a stairwell, a camera that floats out through the ceiling, and an audience that cheered. Scorsese wanted a catharsis; he got applause, and it frightened him.
source After Hours oral history outtakes (2023) Outtakes from Jake Malooley's Air Mail oral history, including the screenwriter admitting he borrowed from Joe Frank's radio piece Lies, and the settlement figure.
film Mean Streets (1973) Four young men in Little Italy, a debt nobody will pay, and a would-be saint who keeps putting his hand in the fire. Scorsese's first film in his own voice, made in Los Angeles for almost nothing.
film Psycho (1960) Hitchcock's cheap, fast, black-and-white shocker — the richest single text for teaching codes, conventions and contexts.
film 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.
film 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.
idea The $85,000 backdrop The Alice prologue set cost $85,000 of a $1.8M budget and shot for one day — five per cent of the film spent on announcing what the film is about.
idea Bickle sees through glass The windscreen and the rear-view mirror are the film's two apertures. Travis is a viewer before he is an actor, and the film is careful about which passengers he is allowed to see.
idea Bresson's hands, Travis's guns The gun-handling sequences copy the pickpocketing in Bresson's Pickpocket. The debt is Schrader's; Scorsese admits he finds Bresson hard to watch.
idea The chant is a metronome, not a spell Light as a feather works because four people lifting together carry 15 kg each. The rhyme's real function is to synchronise them.
idea Chapman pushed the night stock Taxi Driver's wet neon look came from over-developing night-rated Technicolor stock — a 1970s laboratory habit, not a lighting package.
idea Close-ups for no reason After Hours cuts to big close-ups of light switches, keys and locks that turn out to mean nothing. It is Hitchcock's grammar used as a prank on an audience that has learned to read it.
idea Corman offered to make it Black Roger Corman would fund Mean Streets for $150,000 if every character were Black. Scorsese nearly said yes, then couldn't see them in church.
idea The Craft got better as it got older Mixed reviews, a surprise hit, then three decades of reappraisal that inverted which half of the film people take seriously.
idea De Niro wrote in the margins De Niro's annotated shooting script rewrote Travis's dialogue, and the changes reached Schrader's final draft. The film's most quoted line has no screenwriter.
idea The first flushing toilet Psycho is generally credited with the first toilet flushed on screen in a mainstream American film — and the flush is a plot point.
idea The first half hour came from a radio monologue The diner, the bagel paperweights, the $20 out the cab window: Joe Frank had broadcast them in a radio piece called Lies. The screenwriter admitted it decades later, and the settlement was about $30,000.
idea Five set-ups a day became sixteen Scorsese drew every shot of After Hours in the script margins and found he had about 500 of them. At his usual pace that was impossible. Michael Ballhaus said he could do it.
idea The hand in the flame Charlie holds his fingers over a flame three times in Mean Streets: a votive candle, a match, a kitchen grill. It is his private theology, and it recurs in Taxi Driver.
idea Herrmann scored the shower against orders Hitchcock asked for the murder to play unscored. Herrmann wrote the strings anyway, and Hitchcock conceded on the spot.
idea Herrmann finished the score and died that night Bernard Herrmann took some persuading to score a film with a title he disliked. He completed it on Christmas Eve 1975 and died the same night.
idea In every city there's one man Columbia sold Taxi Driver on loneliness, not violence. Scorsese expected audiences to reject the film outright.
idea The jukebox is the score Mean Streets has no composed score. Every note of music comes from a jukebox, a car radio or a window, and most of it is ten years older than the film.
idea Killing the protagonist at minute 47 Psycho spends its first act building a protagonist by the book, then murders her at the mid-point of act two.
idea Manon was invented so nobody could call him The Craft's deity is fake by design. The witchcraft consultant refused to put a real one in a film teenagers would copy.
idea Michael Powell wrote the ending The director of The Red Shoes, by then married to Scorsese's editor, saw a cut of After Hours with Scorsese's father, hated the ending, and suggested the one in the film. He also mentioned Kafka, whom Scorsese had never read.
idea The money dies with Marion The $40,000 sinks into the swamp wrapped in newspaper, and no surviving character ever learns it was there.
idea Ms. Magazine and the twenty-five per cent Alice's warmest feminist review ran in a magazine part-owned by the studio that made it — reception and commerce in one fact.
idea Nancy is the only poor one Three of the four girls want something about themselves changed. Nancy wants out of a trailer. The film punishes her hardest.
idea New York was Los Angeles The definitive Little Italy film was mostly shot in Los Angeles, with garbage added to the streets. What couldn't be faked were the hallways.
idea Nobody agrees whether Johnny Boy dies A gunman played by Scorsese empties a pistol into the car. Critics have him killing Johnny Boy, sparing him, or leaving it open. The film doesn't say.
idea Norman among the birds The parlour's taxidermy is the film's thesis statement in set decoration: predators, prey, and a man already stuffed.
idea Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view Scorsese's flat overhead inserts come from watching a priest lay out the implements of the Mass on an altar — not from any film.
idea Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway One planned ending had Paul climb inside June to hide from the mob and be born again, naked, on a Manhattan street. David Geffen, who was paying, asked if they had lost their minds.
idea The red tint over the bloodbath The muted colour of Taxi Driver's massacre is regularly praised as a stylistic choice. It was the price of an R rating.
idea Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose When the hair falls out, three girls cackle and one is horrified. Rachel True made that choice, and later explained why.
idea Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending Ritual suicide or tabloid item? The writer and the director give incompatible accounts of the same scene, and the film supports both.
idea The shower scene is built from 78 setups Commonly cited: about 78 camera setups and 52 cuts in roughly 3 minutes — and the knife never enters flesh on screen.
idea The keys nearly killed Griffin Dunne To get the point of view of a set of falling keys, the crew dropped a camera platform four storeys on climbing rope and stopped it just above the star's head. The footage was out of focus.
idea Tim Burton stepped aside Before Scorsese, the producers of After Hours wanted a Disney animator with a six-minute cartoon to his name. They could not raise the money with Tim Burton, and then Scorsese's big film collapsed.
idea Too much red In 1975 Michael Powell wrote to Scorsese to say Mean Streets used too much red. Scorsese had got the red from Michael Powell.
idea The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid Scorsese names one Hitchcock film as the source of Taxi Driver's camera moves — and it is the documentary-flat one, not the famous ones.
idea You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople Two songs across one cut: 1943 crooning smashed into 1974 glam — the whole backstory of a life told in an audio transition.
person Harvey Keitel The actor in each of Scorsese's first three films on this site: Charlie in Mean Streets, Ben in Alice, Sport in Taxi Driver. Scorsese's stand-in before De Niro was.
person Martin Scorsese The wiki's first person hub: the filmmaker as walking film archive — personal context made visible.
context Control The institutional context: censorship, classification, editorial power, gatekeeping — who may say what, to whom.
context The Craft turns on its own coven The first hour is about four girls getting power. The second is about taking it back from three of them. The film never reconciles the two.
context Independence, 1973 Mean Streets was self-produced by two first-timers, shot non-union with a Corman crew, and sold to Warner Bros., who released it for two weeks. A case study in what independence bought and what it cost.
context The Last Temptation collapse, 1983 Paramount cancelled Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ with the sets built and the costumes made. After Hours was the film he made to survive it, and nearly everyone involved reads it as that year turned into a comedy.
context Personal The individual context: a maker's own history and style; a viewer's own position and memory.
context The Production Code and Psycho Control context, production lens: Psycho was made by negotiating with a censorship system that was visibly dying.
context Psychoanalysis in postwar America Values context: Psycho's 1960 audience had been primed by a decade of pop-Freud to accept a psychiatrist as the film's final authority.
context The returning veteran, 1976 Taxi Driver never says the word Vietnam after its first ten minutes. The war is in the jacket, the scar and the insomnia — and the film's authors disagree about whether it is there at all.
context Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy Commerce context, reception lens: Hitchcock engineered how the film would be watched, not just what it contained.
context SoHo before the money, 1984 After Hours was shot at night in a neighbourhood of artists' lofts that money was about to discover. The film catches the moment, and treats the uptown visitor as the intruder.
context Values The social and cultural context: whose stories count, what audiences assume, and how both drift over time.
context The women's picture, 1974 Values context, both lenses: Alice made inside the women's movement, marketed by a studio, and argued over by everyone.
film 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.
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.
concept Acting Performance as a symbolic code: who authors it, how the cut and the casting shape it, and why realism is the wrong yardstick.
concept Audio Everything heard: dialogue, effects, music, silence, and the argument over whether sound serves the image or works against it.
concept The camera as voyeur The argument that narrative cinema's default camera position is a watcher who wasn't invited.
concept Camerawork Where the camera stands, how it moves, and what that position makes the audience.
concept Character How a film builds a person out of traits, and whether it ever lets that person decide anything.
concept Chronology The order of telling versus the order of events: flashback, ellipsis, and time folded on purpose.
concept Colour Palette as meaning, and the argument over whether colour speaks by instinct or by rules a film teaches in its first minutes.
concept Conflict What stands between a character and what they want, and whether the film treats that as a device or as its subject.
concept Continuity The form convention that makes cuts invisible: the 180° system, matches, and the grammar audiences never notice learning.
concept Editing The join between shots: cinema's only invisible code, until it decides to be seen.
concept Format The shape of the product itself: medium, runtime, ratio, episode or feature — conventions that precede the first frame.
concept Formula The plot shape a genre's audience arrives already knowing, and the argument over whether repetition is commerce, ritual or both.
concept Iconography The objects, costumes and spaces a genre reuses until they carry its memory, and what that memory is worth.
concept Lighting Light as language: key, fill and shadow, the moral vocabulary one textbook gives them and the grey scale another reduces them to.
concept Mise en scène Everything placed before the camera — and the discipline of reading it as deliberate.
concept Montage Meaning made between shots, not within them. The editing code at its most assertive.
concept Non-diegetic sound Sound the story world cannot account for. Three textbooks draw the line in three places, and the edge cases are where films work.
concept Point of view Whose knowledge the narration is limited to, how deep it goes, and how films move it without saying so.
concept Printed language Words the audience reads: titles, captions, signs, credits. Film Art calls them helpers; media studies calls them anchors.
concept Setting Where and when, and the argument over whether a place expresses its people or acts on its own account.
concept Spoken language Dialogue, voice-over, accent and idiom: the code the textbooks rank lowest and the sound mix ranks highest.
concept Structure The shape of the telling, and whether that shape is a pattern the audience feels or a template the writer follows.
concept The MacGuffin Hitchcock's name for the object the characters chase and the film forgets, and the argument over what its emptiness is for.
concept Themes The questions a genre keeps asking across decades, and whether its answers are a ritual the audience performs or a settlement it is sold.
context Church and street in Little Italy In the neighbourhood Scorsese grew up in, the two powers were the wise guys and the priests. Mean Streets is a film about trying to answer to both.
context Commerce The money context: who pays, what they expect back, and how both shape the text — in production and in reception.