A Personal
Journey with
Martin Scorsese Through American
Movies is a four-hour documentary in which Scorsese examines a selection of his favorite American films grouped according to three different types of directors: the director as an illusionist: D,W. Griffith or F W Murnau, who created new editing techniques among other innovations that made the appeareance of sound & color possible later on, the director as a smuggler - filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk,
Samuel Fuller & Vincente Minelli, who used to hide subversive messages in their films & the director as an iconoclast, those filmmakers attacking social conventionalism — Charles Chaplin,
Erich von Stroheim,
Orson Welles,
Elia Kazan,
Stanley Kubrick,
Arthur Penn &
Sam Peckinpah. A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American
Movies at The Internet Movie Database.
Scorseses 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 &
Orson Welles, he is equally interested in figures working at the margins, film-makers such as Andre De Toth,
Ida Lupino, Sam Fuller & 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 others 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. Theres 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 he never overlooks the illicit pleasure that cinema can bring. I dont really see a conflict between the church & the movies, the sacred & the profane.
