A Personal Journey With Martin Scorcese Through American Movies

This was a documentary put together by Scorsese as part of a Century of Cinema series that looked at the cinema of different countries. I vaguely remember there being a British one, some European ones, an Australian one and a New Zealand one by Sam Neill called Cinema of Unease. I think Scorsese's representation of America's contribution to cinema is interesting because he doesn't look at it in a linear fashion, opting instead to focus on America's three home-grown film genres - the western, the film noir and the musical - and to look at American film from a very subjective point of view.

America is arguably the biggest and most important contributor to the shape and form that most modern cinema takes, so any documentary that seeks to encompass this history completely is going to fall short of the mark. Scorsese sidesteps this altgoether by making the documentary almost like an autobiography of his own personal influences as a filmmaker, and his take on the mission is unashamedly subversive and spoiler-heavy as a result. Yep, there are lots of spoilers about the plots of the films he looks at... the dilemma is: do you watch it and let him spoil all these films for you, or do you not watch it and not get to find out about many lesser-known films you may never have even heard of before? Scorsese shines a light on many forgotten and under-represented filmmakers, predominantly focusing on films and directors that were before his own time as a director (the only real exception to this rule is his singling out of Barry Lyndon, which was made in the 1970s).

The documentary is broken up into three parts and runs for about four hours, but the time flies by. It's broken up into sections such as 'The Director's Dilemma', 'The Director as Storyteller', 'The Western', 'The Gangster Film', 'The Musical', a section on directors from the silent era, 'The Director as Smuggler' (which looks primarily at film noir and the then-controversial themes often hidden in these films), 'The Directors' and 'The Director as Iconoclast'. We're shown extended clips of various films as Scorsese offers partial commentaries; essentially acting a lecturer for film students. It's good teaching though, he's enthusiastic about the subject (film is his life in every way) so it carries over to the viewer, and you don't really need to be a huge film buff to appreciate it.

As expected, Scorsese is also very much an adherent to the cult of the director. Little is said about actors and nearly nothing is mentioned about writers. The whole thing is geared towards auteur theory and Scorsese's acceptance of it is inviolable (you need only look at the predominance of the word 'director' in each of the documentary's chapters to see that). He doesn't argue aggressively in favour of auteur theory, he just presents the documentary as if it's an unspoken fact, and as he's one of the great living and still-working directors I guess I can't really begrudge him his beliefs. My only real criticism of this fascinating documentary is the lack of titles for the interviewees and film excerpts - it would've been helpful to know who and what I was watching at certain points.

SIDENOTE: There are also a lot of interviews with old directors sprinkled throughout this documentary, lots of whom wear eyepatches. I think I counted at least four seperate famous directors with eyepatches!

DIRECTOR: Martin Scorsese, Michael Henry Wilson
WRITER/SOURCE: Martin Scorsese, Michael Henry Wilson

RELATED TEXTS:
- Amongst the films examined and showcased are: Duel in the Sun, The Red House, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Muskateers of Pig Alley, The Furies, The Power Play, Regeneration, I Walk Alone, Force of Evil, Meet Me in St. Louis, My Dream is Yours, Bandwagon, All That Jazz, Cabiria, The Ten Commandments, Intolerance, Seventh Heaven, The Big House, Leave Her to Heaven, Some Came Running, Land of the Pharoahs, Cat People, Point Blank, I Walked With a Zombie, Shock Corridor, Letter From an Unknown Woman, Detour, Outrage, Gun Crazy, T-Men, Raw Deal, Kiss Me Deadly, All That Heaven Allows, Bigger Than Life, The Scarlet Empress, Lolita, Forty Guns, Barry Lyndon, Two Weeks in Another Town, America America, Hell's Highway, Wild Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale.
- Among the directors featured, interviewed or paid tribute to are: F. W. Murnau, Josef Von Sternberg, Douglas Sirk, Erich Von Stroheim, Ida Lupino, Samuel Fuller, Billy Wilder, Cecille B. DeMille, Budd Boettticher, John Cassavetes, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick, Vincent Minelli, Elia Kazan and King Vidor.