person

Martin Scorsese

The wiki's first person hub: the filmmaker as walking film archive — personal context made visible.

director
new-hollywood

b. 1942, New York. Asthmatic kid in Little Italy who watched instead of played; NYU; Mean Streets (1973); then, improbably, a Warner Bros women's picture — Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) — because Ellen Burstyn screened Mean Streets and hired him. Asked what he knew about women, he reportedly answered: "Nothing. But I'd like to learn" (Criterion — At Home in the World). His own version of how the job came to him is more barbed:

In Hollywood they liked Mean Streets a lot, but on the strength of it they thought I could only direct actors, not actresses!

Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 48.

This is the hub note for Scorsese material. Everything Scorsese-related links from here.

Films noted

In release order. The full filmography, with what has been watched, is on the Scorsese watch.

Mean Streets (1973) — the opening, Tony's bar, the back room. His first film in his own voice, and the start of everything the next two inherit.
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) — and its centrepiece, Alice — the prologue.
Taxi Driver (1976) — the mirror, the phone call, the shoot-out. His first acknowledged masterpiece, and the most heavily annotated film on the site.
After Hours (1985) — the diner, the keys, and the ending Michael Powell gave him. The film he made in forty nights after Paramount cancelled The Last Temptation of Christ (The Last Temptation collapse, 1983).

The people who carry across: Harvey Keitel is in the three 1970s films; Robert De Niro in two. Kent Wakeford shot both Mean Streets and Alice. Amy Robinson, Teresa in Mean Streets, produced After Hours, which was the first of his films shot by Michael Ballhaus. And Michael Powell kept giving him notes.

Why he matters to the wiki

Scorsese is the standing case for the Personal context force: a director whose movie-memory is the visible material of his style. The prologue of Alice is the thesis exhibit — childhood rendered as the films that furnished it (The $85,000 backdrop) — but the habit runs everywhere: genre knowledge deployed as feeling, camera moves quoted like scripture. He operated inside the brief New Hollywood window when studios funded that sensibility (Biskind; Commerce).

The other half of the personal context is the altar. The flat overhead inserts that run from Mean Streets through Taxi Driver are, by his own account, a priest laying out the implements of the Mass (Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view) — a formal signature that traces to the church rather than to the cinema. When reading a Scorsese shot, it is worth asking which of the two he is quoting.

His influences are unusually well documented because he names them constantly: Hitchcock's The Wrong Man for paranoid camera (The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid), Bresson by way of Schrader (Bresson's hands, Travis's guns), Ford's The Searchers, Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano, Menzies for painted skies (The $85,000 backdrop). The attributions are a research asset and a trap — see Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending for what happens when the authors of one film describe three different films.

Sources for this person

Scorsese on Scorsese (1989) — his own account, film by film. Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006) — the collaboration from the star's side. Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) — the era, gossip included. Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese — the scholarship, chapter by chapter. Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert — a critic who followed him for four decades. Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey — oral history from the collaborators.

Go on, then

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.
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.
source Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) The New Hollywood chronicle: how the directors briefly took over the studios, told through interviews and gossip.
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.
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 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.