Stars: Martin Scorsese

Summary: Martin Scorsese celebrates American movies from the silent classics to the Hollywood of the seventies. Films featured include: 'The Searchers', 'Citizen Kane', 'Intolerance' and 'The Croud'.

Master auteur Martin Scorsese writes, directs, and hosts this compendium of the greatest works of American cinema, charting the medium's course from nickelodeon reels to digital imaging. The multipart series includes an exhaustive range of clips (supervised by longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker) and interviews with great directors who discuss the nature of cinema authorship and the changing role of the filmmaker. The film consists of head-and-shoulder shots of Scorsese talking to the camera and longer film clips with the director's voice-over, with Scorsese approaching the series in a deeply personal manner, speaking in terms of how films affected him as a director first, followed by the effect they had on him as a storyteller and fan. It is this intimate approach that makes the British Film Institute coproduction such an original achievement. Rather than force Scorsese to tell an objective history, it lets his fanaticism and love for the cinema shine through by allowing him to choose film clips that moved him as an individual. Various chapters include The Director's Dilemma, The Director as Storyteller, The Director as Illusionist, The Director as Smuggler, and The Director as Iconoclast.

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Scorsese's invigorating history of American movies avoids the straitjacket of chronology. Although he makes dutiful nods in the direction of Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles, he is equally interested in figures working at the margins, film-makers such as Andre De Toth, Ida Lupino, Sam Fuller and Edgar Ulmer, "who circumvented the system to get their vision onto the screen". He describes them as "illusionists", "smugglers", con artists who managed to hoodwink the money men into allowing them to make the films they wanted. Some worked in B-movies ("less money, more freedom") others (like Scorsese himself) struck their own Faustian bargains with the studios, making "one movie for them, one for yourself"

His heroes are the outsiders, the film-makers who chafe against the assurances of the American dream. He offers a vivid, guilty vignette of himself as a four-year-old child, sitting in a darkened auditorium watching in amazement as Gregory Peck overpowers Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun, one of the first films his mother took him to. "The savage intensity of the music, the burning sun, the overt sexuality ... it seems that the two could only consummate their passion by killing each other". There's a certain irony in Scorsese, who once seriously considered becoming a priest, succumbing to a David O. Selznick Technicolor extravaganza which had already been condemned by the church.

While often sounding like a serious-minded apprentice who watches old movies to pick up tips which will help him in his own work ("study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas-there's always so much more to learn") he never overlooks the illicit pleasure that cinema can bring. "I don't really see a conflict between the church and the movies, the sacred and the profane". --Geoffrey Macnab

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Year:	1995
Release Date:	June 5, 2000
Runtime:	224 minutes
Certification:	Exempt.
Catalogue Number:	B F I V D 503
Keywords:	With, American, Through, Movies, General, Journey, Entertainment, Martin, Personal, Scorsese, Documentaries, Biographies
Genre:	Documentaries & Biographies