4 Movies | November 15th (actual birthday: November 17th)
“My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.”
- Martin Scorsese
When discussing the world’s greatest working filmmakers, always listed near (or at) the top is director Martin Scorsese. Now in his seventh decade of making movies, Marty has over 90 screen credits in his filmography, including such classics as Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995) and The Departed (2006), for which he received (shockingly) his only Academy Award for Best Director.
Much has been written about Scorsese’s life and career and speculated about what it is that makes him such a great filmmaker.
Perhaps it was his artistic Italian upbringing?
Marty grew up in the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan in the 1940s. Suffering from severe child asthma, his parents kept him mostly indoors by taking him to the cinema.
Here, Marty fell in love with movies.
Was it his education?
Scorsese was one of the first alumni of the legendary TISCH Film School at New York University in the 1960s. His early shorts and student films quickly attracted attention and made him a contemporary of the other “New Hollywood” filmmakers of the time like De Palma, Lucas, Coppola and Bogdanovich.
Sheer genius?
Scorsese was creating his own hand drawn storyboards at age ten.
All of these make Martin Scorsese into Martin Scorsese, but what ties them all together is Marty’s love of the movies.
Marty is one the great movie makers, because he is one of the great movie lovers and that shows in all of his work.
Beyond the movies he’s made, Scorsese has devoted much of his career to the preservation of movies. In 1990, he cofounded the Film Foundation, in 1995 he wrote directed and starred in the documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, launched the World Cinema Project in 2007, and he has been a vocal supporter of Turner Classic Movies ever since its launching.
Martin Scorsese will be celebrating his 80th Birthday on November 17th.
In tribute, TCM will be airing four of the director’s favorite films, chosen by himself.
In the 1950s, Polish writer/director Andrzej Wajda made an unofficial trilogy of anti-war films that addressed Poland’s troubled state immediately following World War II. The last and most critically acclaimed of these was Ashes and Diamonds from 1958. Loosely based on a novel of the same name, the film stars Zbigniew Cybulski as Maciek, a young assassin hired by the anti-communist underground to kill a Russian soldier. After Maciek fails in his first attempt at the murder, he discovers he had just served alongside his potential victim during the war. Things grow even more complicated when Maciek falls in love with a beautiful barmaid (played by Ewa Krzyzewska) who makes him question his life as a killer. Wajda gave his film a very noirish atmosphere with heavy use of shadows and fog to make this already dark story even more bleak. The film was well received upon release, but faced criticism during the Fall of Communism movement in the 1980s when it was deemed historically inaccurate. Today however, the film is regarded as one of the best of Polish cinema and a groundbreaker in political films.
In addition to Scorsese, the film has been named a favorite by Francis Ford Coppola, Hayao Miyazaki and Roy Andersson.
Martin Scorsese’s Catholic Faith is one the most important parts of his life. As a young man, he seriously considered the priesthood, even attending a year of seminary school. This deep faith is reflected in much of his work. His films The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Silence (2016) are both highly religious films and both daring with their depictions of the holy as actual human beings. He also is a devoted fan of the Italian neorealism of the 1950s, a film movement that showed the economic turmoil of post World War II Italy. In his documentary My Voyage to Italy (1999), Scorsese discusses at length the work of Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Scorsese’s faith and Italian heritage are also reflected in his favorite films. The 1964 film The Gospel According to St. Matthew presents a realistic depiction of the rise, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Writer/director/activist Pier Paolo Pasolini was a controversial figure in 1960s Italy. An open Marxist, homosexual and atheist, Pasolini may have seemed a peculiar choice to tell the story of Jesus Christ. However, he later explained that he wanted to show that as a nonbeliever he could tell the story from the perspective of a believer. His success is clear with the film now being a favorite of many religious figures and organizations, including the Vatican.
The French New Wave film movement of the 1960s saw the emergence of some of Martin Scorsese’s (and all cinephiles’) favorite films and filmmakers. The work of Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Demy and particularly Francois Truffaut has been a direct influence. He even once stated “the French New Wave has influenced all filmmakers who have worked since, whether they saw the films or not.” The 1962 film Jules and Jim is often cited as Truffaut’s masterpiece and one of the best of French cinema. The title characters (played by Oskar Werner and Henri Serre) are a German Austrian and a Frenchman who become friends in early twentieth century Paris. The two pursue their dreams of becoming writers, until both fall in love with the free-spirited Catherine (memorably played by Jeanne Moreau). The love triangle is disrupted by World War I, which places Jules and Jim on opposite sides of the global conflict. Truffaut had sought to adapt the autobiographical novel by Henri Pierre-Roche as early as age 23.
Scorsese and Truffaut buffs have listed Jules and Jim as a direct influence on one of Scorsese’s most popular and praised films, 1990’s Goodfellas. Both films have a rapid pace and camera movement, and both make heavy use of voice over narration and the freeze frame. Pretty interesting way of connecting a French love story and an Italian American mob movie.
Scorsese’s love of French Cinema continues today, including with more current films. The 2016 documentary My Journey Through French Cinema by Bertrand Tavernier could easily be compared to Scorsese’s own previous film documentaries. The film not only covers French New Wave, but all of French cinema from the 1930s to the 70s. Like Scorsese, Tavernier was an enormous cinephile and it shows in this documentary. Tavernier enthusiastically praises the work of Truffaut, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne and others. The film has an abundance of film clips as well as rare archival footage of the filmmakers and stars themselves, both on set and in conversation talking about their filmmaking process. This would ultimately be the final film of Tavernier before his death of pancreatitis in 2021 at the age of 79. This ended a long career in both feature films and documentary. This last project would become one of his most acclaimed, even receiving a nomination for the Golden Eye Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
The list of films and filmmakers which Scorsese continues to cite as favorites and influences is endless. Scorsese has often listed the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, in particular The Red Shoes (1948) and Tales of Hoffman (1951), as personal favorites and early influences.
From musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) by Vincente Minnelli, to suspense thrillers like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), to epic Westerns like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Scorsese has expressed his love for an enormous range of movies and their impact on his work and life. He will always be one of the great cinephiles, and in turn he continues to be one of the great filmmakers. Now at 80 years old, Martin Scorsese is showing no signs of slowing down. He currently has a new motion picture, Killers of the Flower Moon, set for release next year and a number of other projects in pre-production.
No doubt Martin Scorsese will continue to share his love of the movies forever, both with his own filmmaking and with his work as an advocate of film preservation and retrospective. Both classic and current cinema are all the better for the work and artistry of Martin Scorsese.
Happy Birthday Marty!
