Contexts

Production and reception contexts — commerce, control, values and the personal — following the Axis of Action contexts framework.

• 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.
• Commerce The money context: who pays, what they expect back, and how both shape the text — in production and in reception.
• Control The institutional context: censorship, classification, editorial power, gatekeeping — who may say what, to whom.
• 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.
• Personal The individual context: a maker's own history and style; a viewer's own position and memory.
• 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.
• Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy Commerce context, reception lens: Hitchcock engineered how the film would be watched, not just what it contained.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The Production Code and Psycho Control context, production lens: Psycho was made by negotiating with a censorship system that was visibly dying.
• 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.
• 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.
• Values The social and cultural context: whose stories count, what audiences assume, and how both drift over time.