Skip to main content

Martin Scorsese Introduces Classic Movies: From Citizen Kane and Vertigo to Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind

In today’s cinema culture, there’s only one thing as reliably entertaining as watching a Martin Scorsese movie: watching Martin Scorsese talk about the movies of his predecessors. Before becoming a director, one must understand what a director does, an education delivered to the young Scorsese practically at a stroke by Citizen Kane. Watching Orson Welles’ masterpiece (in the original sense), Scorsese also “began to become aware of editing and camera positions,” as he recalls in the clip above.

It comes from an interview conducted by the American Film Institute, which also collected the ultra-cinephile New Hollywood icon’s takes on a series of other classic pictures including John Ford’s The Searchers and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

In discussing Citizen Kane these days, of course, a different Hitchcock film tends to rush into the discussion: Vertigo, which displaced Citizen Kane on the top spot of the latest Sight & Sound Critics Poll in 2012. Whatever his feelings about the comparative merits of Welles and Hitchcock, Scorsese would surely be unlikely to balk at this changing of the guard.

When he first saw Vertigo with his friends, as he puts it in the clip just above, “we thought it was good; we didn’t know why.” Re-watching it in the intervening decades, he found its beating heart in “the obsession of the character,” James Stewart’s traumatized ex-cop bent on re-creating the object of his infatuation. “The story doesn’t matter. You watch that film repeatedly and repeatedly because of the way he takes you through his obsession.”

The late 1950s and early 60s must have been a fine time for a budding cinephile. Not only could you enter and leave the theater at any time, staying as long as you liked — a custom whose pleasures he emphasizes more than once — you could walk in on these works of surprising cinematic art. But stepping into David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the twenty-year-old Scorsese had to have an inkling of what he was in for. “There it is, up on the screen in 70 millimeter,” he remembers. “The main character is not Ben-Hur, it’s not a saint, it’s not a man struggling to come to terms with God and his soul and his heart; it’s a character that really, in a way, comes out of a B movie.” No doubt this portrayal of Lawrence as a “self-destructive” and “self-loathing” protagonist at an epic scale did its part to influence what would become Scorsese’s own cinema.

Scorsese also finds much to admire, and even use, in films from before his time. “It’s melodramatic, it’s stereotypes — racial stereotypes — and yet, you know, those characters,” he says of Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind. “There’s complexity to them.” Though its production “smacks of the nineteenth century” (with which Scorsese himself has exhibited his own fascination in The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York), it stands alongside Casablanca as one of “the two high points of the studio system.” Few experiences so forthrightly deliver “that magic of old Hollywood,” one variety of the power of cinema that Scorsese knows well. But as his remarks on everything from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to Thorald Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades to Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar show us, he’s more than acquainted with many other varieties besides.

Related Content:

The Decay of Cinema: Susan Sontag, Martin Scorsese & Their Lamentations on the Decline of Cinema Explored in a New Video Essay

Martin Scorsese Names His Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection

Martin Scorsese Introduces Filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, “The Woody Allen of Korea”

Martin Scorsese Creates a List of 39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker

What Makes Citizen Kane a Great Film: 4 Video Essays Revisit Orson Welles’ Masterpiece on the 80th Anniversary of Its Premiere

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Martin Scorsese Introduces Classic Movies: From Citizen Kane and Vertigo to Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3uI7Fp5
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more