martin scorsce.pdf

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6 FILMMAKING TIPS

FROM MARTIN SCORSESEIn his review of Mean Streets, Roger Ebert claimed that

Martin Scorsese had the potential to become the American Fellini in ten

years. It probably didn’t really take that long.

Scorsese is a living library of film, but he isn’t a dusty repository of

knowledge. He’s a vibrant, imaginative creator who might know more

about movies than anyone else on the planet, and that makes him

uniquely qualified to be both prolific and proficient.Over the course of his career, he’s created indelible works bursting with

anger, violence, fragility, care, and wonder. Never content to stick with

one story mode, he’s run the gamut of styles and substance. So here’s a

free bit of film school (for filmmakers and fans alike) from our American

Fellini.

Never Stop Looking For Inspiration (Because You’re Gonna Need It)

Scorsese: One night I was watching late-night films on . . . I think it was

on Showtime. There was this film called Yeelen [1987]. The picture had

just started at 2:30 in the morning, and the image was very captivating,

and I watched the whole thing. I discovered that it was directed by

Souleymane Cissé and came from Mali. I got so excited. I had seen

Ousmane Sembène’s films from Senegal-he was the first to put African

cinema on the map, in the ’60s-but I hadn’t seen anything quite like this .. . the poetry of the film. I’ve seen many, many movies over the years, and

there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to

continue to make films. This was one of them.

Spike Lee: So you’re telling me that Martin Scorsese, the father of

cinema, needs inspiration to make more films?

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Scorsese: Well, it gets you excited again. Sometimes when you’re heavy

into the shooting or editing of a picture, you get to the point where you

don’t know if you could ever do it again. Then suddenly you get excited

by seeing somebody else’s work. So it’s been almost 20 years now with

the Film Foundation. We’ve participated in restoring maybe 475

American films.

That’s from a conversation in “Interview” magazine between Spike Lee

and Martin Scorsese where an important distinction is made. It’s easy to

see master filmmakers as endless wells of imagination, but stone

sharpens stone, and that well needs to be replenished. The key? Nomatter how natural a storyteller, no matter how much experience, there

will always be a need to find that creative spark.

You’re Never Going to Get the Money You Want

“I think there’s only one or two films where I’ve had all the financial

support I needed. All the rest, I wish I’d had the money to shoot another

ten days.”

This might seem obvious, but there’s also something freeing about

knowing deep down that there will be very real limitations on trying to

achieve.

The flipside for fans is to keep in mind that most filmmakers (or at least

Scorsese) always creates a final product that could have used more time

and more money to make just a bit better. Perfection is out of reach, but

excellence is not. Your Personal Story Matters

Scorsese’s movies are reflections of his past and his personality. He draws

a lot of script pages – specifically from his time growing up in New York

and inside Catholicism – from intimate experiences and curiosity. That

doesn’t simply apply to subject matter. It also applies to tone:

“I’m not interested in a realistic look – not at all, not ever. Every film

should look the way I feel.”

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Curiously, in that same interview with Ebert, Scorsese discusses his use of

non-realistic elements – including the fabled 48 frames per second used

to make De Niro in Taxi Driver look “a monster, a robot, King Kong

coming to save Fay Wray…”

Watch These 85 Movies (and Then Watch More)

When Fast Company interviewed Scorsese after Hugo‘s 11 Oscar

nominations, they got more than they bargained for. The director

referenced 85 different movies during their conversation, pulling out

specific lessons and influences from all. A lot of criticism was lobbedtoward the list because of what it doesn’t include, but this is the stuff that

simply popped off the top of his head. Is there any doubt that these 85

flicks are a good starting point or that there are 850 more worthy of

learning from?

At any rate, Apocalypse Now and Arsenic and Old Lace make a hell of a

double feature.

Treat Everyone Equally On Set

“I think it’s really the mood that he makes on the set… He makes

everyone feel equal, no matter who you are, no matter how big you are,

no matter how famous you are, no matter how iconic you are… you feel

equal to each other,” – Chloe Moretz on Scorsese

This is indicative of the kind of working environment that one of the best

directors on the planet creates. He can ensure that a teenage girl feelscomfortable and equal to the most seasoned person on set (which might

just be him).

Scorsese once talked about the idea of delegating care to people like

doctors and paramedics (in regards to Bringing Out the Dead). That we

farm out empathy so that others can singularly be responsible for taking

care of others, and how we had to resist the urge to close ourselves off to

those feelings. That connection to other people. He also talks often about

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bringing kindness to everything he makes. It may seem a bit touchy-

feely, but the results speak for themselves.

Don’t Be Afraid of Hands-On Research

Get in the taxi with Robert De Niro driving. Take a ride-along on an

ambulance. Have the experiences that will help make your story sing.

What Have We Learned

From Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to Taxi Driver to Raging Bull,

Goodfellas, The Departed and Hugo, the best lessons from Martin

Scorsese seem to come loud and direct from the way he makes his

movies. They explore and question, all while celebrating the sheer magicof cinema. Even the violence has a kind of care behind it, a deeper look

into the melted mind of a troubled man or the dark heart of a corrupt

underground.

It’s funny, then, that Scorsese once famously named 85 movies that

influenced him, because as a director, he’s given us 31 himself. Here’s

hoping for at least 31 more.

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The Movie Man: Martin Scorsese

There are few filmmakers who rival Martin Scorsese’s contribution tocinema. The 69-year-old New Yorker is part of the passionate and highly

film-literate moviemakers (including Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De

Palma, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) that started their careers in

the 1970s during the New Hollywood era. These directors created the

modern blockbuster and came to define American cinema.

Whether making gangster films, period films or biopics, Scorseseexplores aspects of masculinity, identity and violence. His protagonists

are often loners in a chaotic world trying to make sense of the madness

around them, grappling with issues of guilt, penance and spiritual

enlightenment. Nostalgia plays a big part in Scorsese’s films, but so do

regret and loss. Many of his films end ambiguously, with a sense of irony

or with the main character on the decline. Frequently working with the

same crew, including editor Thelma Schoonmaker on almost every film,

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and the same actors (such as Robert De Niro and, more recently, Leonardo

DiCaprio), Scorsese is one of the few American auteurs, as his films can be

regarded as a personal expression of his author-like direction.

Many of Scorsese’s early films reflected his childhood as the son of

Catholic Italian immigrants living in New York. While attending film

school in the 1960s he made a handful of short films before making his

first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967). It starred his then-

preferred leading actor, Harvey Keitel, as a typically Scorsesesque

troubled man. The film contained some hallmarks of his later films with

its focus on Italian-American communities, life-on-the-street feel, and arock soundtrack. Following Boxcar Bertha (1972), which he made with

legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman, Scorsese made Mean

Streets(1973). This film announced his arrival as a filmmaker of note, and

was the first time Scorsese worked with De Niro, capturing the stories,

characters and atmosphere of Little Italy in New York City, where Scorsese

grew up.

After his under-appreciated Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), a

rare Scorsese film with a leading female protagonist (played by Ellen

Burstyn), he made his masterpiece. Taxi Driver (1976) featured De Niro as

an insomniac Vietnam veteran, Travis Bickle, who descends into violent

madness. The film coined the phrase ‘are you talkin’ to me’, inspired the

1981 assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan and remains

one of the greatest cinematic portrayals of paranoid psychosis. Moreimportantly, Taxi Driver established Scorsese’s favourite techniques of

using slow motion and fluid tracking shots to convey the subjective

experience of his protagonists.

Reflecting his love of different cinematic movements from all over the

world, a Scorsese film will often blend cinema-vérité techniques with the

dreamlike imagery of avant-garde films. These elements were stunningly

combined in Scorsese’s 1980 biopic, Raging Bull, with De Niro as the

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turbulent boxer Jake LaMotta. This black-and-white epic portrays

masculinity at its most violent, reprehensible, pitiful and tragic. Taxi

Driver might be the masterpiece, but Raging Bull is the definitive

Scorsese film.

Between Taxi Driver and Raging Bull Scorsese made the homage to

Hollywood musicals, New York, New York (1977) and a concert film of The

Band, The Last Waltz (1978).

Throughout his career, Scorsese’s love of music is expressed on his

soundtracks, which alternate between original scores by composers such

as Bernard Herrmann, Philip Glass and Peter Gabriel, and eclectic popand rock compilations. He also produced the 2003 documentary series,

The Blues, and has made documentaries about Bob Dylan (No Direction

Home; 2005), the Rolling Stones (Shine a Light; 2008) and most recently

George Harrison (Living in the Material World; 2011). He even directed

the ‘Bad’ music video for Michael Jackson in 1987.

Scorsese’s 1980s films were slightly left-of-field ventures. And, with the

forgettable exception of The Color of Money (1986; a sequel to the Paul

Newman classic of 1961, The Hustler), they are fascinating. The King of

Comedy (1983) cast De Niro as a struggling comedian trying to get the

attention of a famous talk-show host, played by Jerry Lewis. It’s Taxi Driver

as a critique of showbiz. After Hours (1985) was a low-budget surreal

comedy about a man in New York trying to get home one night. Of most

interest was The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), a highly controversialfilm that depicted what Christ’s life may have been like if he didn’t die on

the cross and lived as a mortal man. Despite accusations of blasphemy,

the film remains an extraordinary examination of spirituality and faith.

In 1990, Scorsese made the gangster masterpiece Goodfellas. It’s classic

Scorsese: violent, focused on the Italian-American mob, ending with a

whimper rather than a bang, featuring De Niro among others, and full of

iconic music and visual flourishes. Following his 1991 remake of the

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1962 thriller Cape Fear, with De Niro playing the vengeful former convict

Max Cady, Scorsese made Casino (1995), which functioned as a sort of

unofficial but far more violent follow-up to Goodfellas. The final

‘conventional’ Scorsese film of the 1990s was Bringing out the

Dead(1999), where he teamed up with writer (and also director) Paul

Schrader for the forth and final time after previously collaborating on Taxi

Driver,Raging Bull and Last Temptation. Dead was an almost black comic

retelling of Taxi Driver, this time featuring an exhausted paramedic

played by Nicolas Cage.

After Goodfellas, the two standout 1990s films for Scorsese were the lessobvious The Age of Innocence (1993) and Kundun (1997). An adaptation

of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel, Innocence did not seem like a typical

Scorsese film, but its New York setting and melancholic male protagonist,

Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), were Scorsese hallmarks. Likewise, a

film about the 14th Dalai Lama initially seemed an odd choice,

butKundun displayed Scorsese’s command of using film style to convey

the experience of a male protagonist in a world he struggles to

comprehend. Just as Scorsese’s other religiously themed film, Last

Temptation, attracted controversy, so did Kundun – this time from the

Chinese Government, which wasn’t pleased about a film depicting the

exiled Tibetan leader sympathetically.

The past decade has seen Scorsese repeatedly collaborate with actor

Leonardo DiCaprio, starting with the disappointing period crimedrama,Gangs of New York (2002). The director–actor partnership with

DiCaprio picked up in 2004 with the impressive biopic, The Aviator, about

the notoriously reclusive film producer and aviation pioneer, Howard

Hughes. In 2010 the pair worked together on Shutter Island, one of

Scorsese’s most misunderstood films (the complex, subjective film style

used to signal the true nature of DiCaprio’s US Marshal character was

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mistaken for giving away the ‘twist’ ending, which was in fact not a twist

at all).

Scorsese’s 2000s peak came in 2006 with The Departed, a remake of the

2002 Hong Kong crime drama, Infernal Affairs. Once more full of

Scorsese’s trademark crime violence and psychopathic male

characters,The Departed was a complex film about identity and loyalty.

Some audiences were annoyed that Scorsese had remade a recent and

much loved Hong Kong film, while others preferred Scorsese’s less

melodramatic and more straightforward version. The Departed finally

earned Scorsese an Academy Award for Best Director (he had previouslybeen nominated five times).

The importance of what Scorsese has done for cinema cannot be

understated. Not only has he made numerous American classics, he has

also long campaigned for the need to preserve older films. He has made

documentaries about American and Italian cinema, and is endlessly

championing films from all over the world. He co-created the Film

Foundation in 1990, and the World Cinema Foundation in 2007 (both

organisations are dedicated to the preservation and restoration of films).

The man loves cinema, which is what is so beautifully expressed in his

latest 3D family film, Hugo (2011). Not only does Hugo celebrate the

wonders of films from a previous era, it introduces a whole new

generation to the joys of cinema. Unlike his many protagonists, Scorsese

is not about to fade into obscurity. Indeed, he is making films that are asremarkable, inspirational and unpredictable as anything else he has

done during his extraordinary career.

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Scorsese, ‘pressionist

Shutter Island.

I was interested in the way she presented herself at that moment. Later

on I figured out that as she gets up from the chair we should do it in

three cuts, three separate close-ups, because I think he’ll never forget that

moment the rest of his life. He’ll play it back many times. . . . It’s just his

perception, his memory of what it’s going to be like. . . . We shot it veryquickly, two takes each, one at 24 frames, one at 36, and one 48.

Martin Scorsese, on filming The Age of Innocence.

Few directors think so carefully about how a film looks and sounds.

Sensitive to technique in the work of classic filmmakers, Martin Scorsese

has always tried to give each picture a vivid visual and auditory profile.

Although he’s often praised for his realism (usually prefaced by the

adjective “gritty”), Scorsese is often a subjectively oriented director. Thisquality goes beyond the justly celebrated performances of his actors. He

is unafraid to use unusual cinematic techniques to thrust us boldly into

the characters’ minds and emotions. In this effort he joins some great

cinematic traditions. No surprise there: He has an immediate sense that

film history hovers over every choice a director makes.

Spoilers loom out of the mist ahead.

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Inside out, outside in

[2]

Raskolnikov.

Once American filmmakers developed a model of visual storytelling in

the late 1910s, filmmakers elsewhere were surprisingly quick to push it

in more subjective directions. There emerged something like an

international division of techniques.

To convey inner experience, German directors of the 1910s and 1920sworked principally on aspects of mise-en-scene—performance, staging,

setting, lighting, costume, make-up, and the like. The classic example is

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in which the cutting and camerawork

are fairly conservative, but the setting and acting seek to convey a

madman’s vision of the world.

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[3]

Caligari “subjectivizes” the characters’ surroundings, a process signaled

through warped perspectives and fantastically distorted settings.

This brand of visual contortion became the hallmark of what was called

German Expressionist cinema. Scholars argue about exactly what films

belong under that rubric, but Caligari, along with From Morn to Midnight

(1920) and Raskolnikov (1923, above), are pretty uncontroversial

examples of making the external world reflect the characters’ psychicturmoil.

At the same period, French directors were also experimenting with

subjective cinema. But they tended to concentrate less on mise-en-scene

and more on what the camera could do to suggest both optical and

mental point of view. In the so-called “French Impressionist” school, we

find framings, angles, distorting lenses, changes of focus, slow-motion,

and other cinematographic techniques used to suggest characters’

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mental states. Thus in Germaine Dulac’s Smiling Madam Beudet (1923),

the downtrodden wife sees her husband as monstrous.

In El Dorado (1921) Marcel L’Herbier uses a gauzy filter to suggest that

his heroine is distracted, before pulling it aside and letting her face come

into focus.

A little later, leading Soviet filmmakers made editing, not mise-en-scene

or camerawork, their most salient technique. They experimented with

graphic and rhythmic montage, as well as cuts that sacrificed spatial and

temporal continuity to eye-smiting impact.

Of course this three-way division of technical labor is too neat. You findsome camera experimentation in German Expressionism, as with the fast

motion in Nosferatu (1922). The French were using rapid cutting even

before the Soviets, as Gance’s La Roue (1923) shows. And some Soviets,

such as Eisenstein and the FEKS directors, explored unusual lighting and

camera angles. It should be said, though, that these shared techniques

often serve different purposes. Fast cutting in Impressionist films tends to

suggest the heightened experience of the characters, rather than serving,

as in the Soviet case, to dynamize a historical situation for the viewer. The

quick cutting in the carnival ride in Jean Epstein’s Coeur fidèle (1923)

simulates the chaotic burst of “impressions” felt by the characters, but the

quick cutting in the street riot of Strike (1925) doesn’t mimic the

characters’ states but aims to arouse shock and suspense in us.

In any case, my technical division remains only a first approximationtoward understanding pretty complicated historical trends. The main

point is that both the German Expressionist and the French Impressionist

filmmakers of the 1920s were seeking to use particular film techniques

to give the audience a deeper sense of the characters’ sensory experience

and emotional states.

American cinema selectively adopted some of these tactics of lighting

and set design. In a blog entry [7] and a web essay [8], I’ve written about

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William Cameron Menzies as one importer of the German approach. You

can see Expressionist touches inFox’s Mr. Moto movies [9]. Likewise, 1940s

films particularly enjoyed mimicking Impressionist camera tricks to

signal drunkenness, delirium, hallucination, and other altered states.

Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Wilder’s Lost Weekend (1945) are

famous examples. Typically such Expressionist and Impressionist touches

were associated with crime, craziness, or genre stylization. Much of this

flagrant irrealism went out of A-pictures in the 1950s, but it survived in

horror and, interestingly, in the US avant-garde cinema of Deren,

Markopoulos, and others.One of Scorsese’s contributions to the 1970s, I think, was to revive and

consolidate this legacy. While we were celebrating his films as victories

for urban realism and neo-Method acting, many of the movies were also

charged exercises in subjective cinema.

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Making streets mean, and meaningful

Taxi Driver.

From Mean Streets (1973) everyone remembers the aura of street-punk

camaraderie, the harsh turns of mood (usually triggered by Johnny Boy’srecklessness), and the vibrancy of the neighborhood, with its social

hierarchy and rituals of bullying and bluff and negotiation. Alongside

these tokens of realism we find breathless grace notes, as when Charlie

glides through the club, a visual equivalent of his joy in being among

pals and sexy women. (The shot was made by having Keitel ride the dolly

instead of walking in front of it.)

This euphoria of this neo-Impressionist shot is counterbalanced later bythe Rubber Biscuit song, with Charlie now thoroughly drunk and floating

in grotesque frontal close-up before the floor rises up to kiss his head.3]

Charlie has come in to the club announcing himself as Jesus, a pious

man to create order. Now this shot charts his fall from drunken

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exuberance into queasiness and mounting anxiety about Johnny Boy’s

debt.

More generally, Tony’s club is given heavily unrealistic treatment through

slow-motion and faked slow-motion, along with character movement

synchronized with the music. If the camerawork mimics Charlie’s mental

states in Impressionist fashion, the ruby-red club lighting suggests his

erotic inflammation in a mildly Expressionist one.

Taxi Driver (1976) is Scorsese’s most famous venture into subjectivity.From the first shot of the cab heaving through wafting vapor—steam?

smoke? sulfur fumes?—we cut to a man’s eyes, and then to dissolving

views of the city through a rainy windshield.[18]

From the start Scorsese announces one of his most basic strategies: a

realistic motivation for expressionist effects. It’s only rain, but shooting it

through the windshield and adding slow motion gives the streets an

otherworldly shimmer. As the neon dribbles down the glass, and we see

pedestrians moving through tinted clouds like hesitant ghosts, the man’s

face becomes bathed in a red glow—vaguely motivated as reflected from

the traffic light, but unrealistically saturated, as in the Mean Streetsclub.

We see the real New York, but filtered through the eyes of a man who

considers it an open sewer. The plot will soon lock us into hisconsciousness more explicitly, through restricted point of view and voice-

over diary extracts and crisp montages of the cruising cab. In addition,

the motifs introduced here, particularly purifying water and blips of light,

will become elaborated in the course of the movie. The general point,

however, is that Scorsese has updated Impressionist and Expressionist

tactics in order to reveal a man’s mind through images.

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Qui tollis peccata mundi

Bringing Out the Dead.

In some films Scorsese plays things straighter, invoking subjectivity only

briefly. There are the prizefights and the visions of Vicki in Raging Bull

(1980), and the slipperier passages of fantasy in The King of Comedy

(1982). But other films plunge us deeply into subjectivity, forcing the

world through the filter of a driven character’s sensibility.For thoroughgoing efforts in this direction we can look to Bringing Out

the Dead (1999). In this movie about a paramedic haunted by spirits of

those unfortunates he might have saved, Scorsese along with

cinematographer Robert Richardson and production designer Dante

Ferretti reinvoke the nightmarish qualities of Taxi Driver. The exhilaration

Frank Pierce gets from saving lives is offset by his despair at gambling

with death every night. The result is another exercise in neo-

Impressionism and –Expressionism.

Once again rain and light, objectively out there in the urban world,

become projections of the character’s tormented psyche, thanks to

camera angle and framing. The windshield gives Frank’s face phantom

tears.

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Once again concrete shapes and colors, filtered through a movingvehicle, are distorted to suggest the protagonist’s anxieties.

To measure Frank’s descent into desperation, the camera even follows the

ambulance upside down, or sideways.

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Scorsese ventures into full-blown Expressionism as well. There arenaturally dream sequences, but we also get the unforgettable image of

the drug dealer Sy, impaled on a fence rail and reaching toward

skyscrapers as fireworks (real fireworks?) consecrate his gesture. Later,

hurtling through the city and moving closer to mental breakdown, Frank

starts to see every woman on the street as Rosa, the woman he could not

rescue. How the Germans would have loved having CGI available for such

a hallucination.

Perhaps the subtlest touches are the patches of blown-out white. At first

they seem a signal of death, gleaming off the bodies of Mary’s father and

the young man found on the street.

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In the final scene, Frank tells Mary of her father’s death (and sees her as

Rosa). She invites him in and eventually he falls asleep in her arms. The

final shot quietly shifts from a normal, rather dark texture, to one

endowing his shirt with a blinding glow.

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This change in lighting and exposure, unmotivated by any realistic

source, suggests that Frank feels he has found a bit of peace, while also

hinting that a spiritual radiance has entered this unhappy world through

a tortured secular saint.

Shutter Island caters to the ‘pressionist side of Scorsese’s vision. It hovers

between realism and subjectivity: parts of what we see are really

happening in the fiction, while other parts are wholly in Teddy/ Edward’s

mind. The difference is that here the balance tips strongly toward

expressionism. Apart from the dream sequences, certain hallucinations

are rendered in undistorted terms. So, for instance, scenes like the cave

conversation with the second Rachel Solando are wholly Teddy’s mental

projections. Other scenes oscillate between subjectivity and objectivity, as

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when Teddy is preparing to set fire to Cawley’s car and talks with his wife

Dolores–although the next shot confirms she’s not really there.

I find all this less resourceful than the virtuosic ways in which Scorsese

subjectivizes the neighborhoods of New York. The Gothic trappings of the

hospital, the cagelike wards, and the rainswept island offer lessopportunity for novel stylization than an urban landscape. Moreover, I

think that the creaky gimmick ruling the plot of Shutter Island relies on

farfetched explanations and leaves too many loose ends. If the storm

didn’t really occur, as Dr. Cawley tells us, then did the storm-tossed

dialogues with Chuck not occur either? Why are the doctors talking about

the prospects of a (nonexistent) flood before Teddy even comes into the

room? And could the inmates be relied upon to execute the physicians’

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complex role-playing game? A second viewing left me in the dark about

matters that a Shyamalan would have tidied up.

But I did have to admire the way in which Scorsese uses Teddy’s

breakdown as an alibi for the mismatched cuts I’ve objected to before. [30]

(Some legerdemain with a water glass is particularly clever.) And the

ending supplies one further twist that somewhat ennobles the whole

loopy contraption.

Cranking it up

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[32]

Crank 2: High Voltage.

You can argue that Scorsese’s talent was well suited to this project: We

don’t notice the plot problems because his stylistic assurance carries us

along smoothly. That assurance allows me to raise my final point.

I’ve argued elsewhere, in books and on this site [33], that Hollywood

storytelling techniques have been overhauled in recent decades. Over

the last forty years or so, filmmakers have amped up the “continuity style”

forged in the 1910s. They have cut faster, sometimes averaging 2-3

seconds per shot across a film. They have relied more heavily on singles

(shots of one character), and these singles are often fairly large close-ups.

Directors have also embraced extremes in lens lengths—very long lenses(for that perspective-flattening effect) and very wide-angle ones (often

yielding flagrant distortions). Filmmakers have also relied a great deal on

camera movement, frequently tracking in or out or even circling around

the characters as they speak. The basic premises of continuity cinema

aren’t violated, but the result is more aggressive visuals. Hence my label

“intensified continuity.”

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I think that intensified continuity became the new baseline for popular

filmmaking both in the US and overseas. Over this style, however, some

filmmakers have laid lots of fancy filigree. Many flashy techniques fill our

movies. We get slow-motion, fast-motion, reverse-motion, ramping, and

freeze-frames. There are brutal jump cuts, ragged shifts between color

and monochrome, deliberately awkward framings, abrupt overhead

compositions, slippery focus, and jerky handheld shooting. On the

soundtrack we get ominous rumblings, metallic crashes, and noisy

transitions. The Bourne films and The Hurt Locker (2009) offer moderate

examples, but edging toward the extreme you have Crank 2: HighVoltage (2009). Here intensified continuity has itself been intensified to a

height of frenzied artifice. “Over the top” doesn’t capture it. There is, it

seems, no longer a top to go over.

This swaggering style takes classical space and time as its basis—we still

have analytical cutting, over-the-shoulder shots, and the like—but it

pushes beyond the modest demands of simply laying out dramatic

elements for easy comprehension. The intensified approach, itself trying

for punch, has been raised to a new level of shock and awe. This trend, I’d

speculate, is an escalation of tendencies seen in 1970s-1980s

filmmakers like Brian De Palma, Ken Russell, Nicholas Roeg, Ridley Scott,

and Scorsese.

Scorsese’s technical élan proved enormously influential, I think; Mean

Streets is virtually a compendium of the new techniques. But unlikesome others, he explored the emerging style in order to probe characters’

feelings and moods. Many of today’s amped-up techniques come off as

merely eye candy, or prods for visual arousal, or pieces of narrational

subterfuge (as often in De Palma). Scorsese has sought to make these

decorative techniques more operatic—perhaps in the tradition of Visconti,

Michael Powell, and other filmmakers he admires. The images (and of

course the music) swirl around the action, providing cadenzas that bring

25


26/26

out feelings which his men often can’t articulate. Sometimes the stylistic

accompaniment becomes bombastic, as I think Shutter Island largely is.

Yet the finest of Scorsese’s pictures contribute to a rich tradition in which

the cinema, normally committed to objective realism, makes palpable

what goes on inside us.

Scorsese’s remarks on The Age of Innocence come from a Film Comment

interview with Gavin Smith reprinted in Martin Scorsese Interviews [34],

ed. Peter Brunette (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 200.

For more on Expressionist and Impressionist silent cinema, see our FilmHistory: An Introduction, Chapters 4 and 5. By the end of the 1920s,

these tendencies and Soviet Montage were blending into a sort of

international style, a development considered in Chapter 8.

26
http://www.amazon.com/Martin-Scorsese-Interviews-Filmmakers/dp/1578060729/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271863907&sr=8-1

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