6 FILMMAKING TIPS

FROM MARTIN SCORSESE

In his review of Mean Streets, Roger Ebert claimed that

Martin Scorsese had the potential to become the American Fellini in ten
years. It probably didnt really take that long.
Scorsese is a living library of film, but he isnt a dusty repository of
knowledge. Hes a vibrant, imaginative creator who might know more
about movies than anyone else on the planet, and that makes him
uniquely qualified to be both prolific and proficient.
Over the course of his career, hes created indelible works bursting with
anger, violence, fragility, care, and wonder. Never content to stick with
one story mode, hes run the gamut of styles and substance. So heres a
free bit of film school (for filmmakers and fans alike) from our American
Fellini.
Never Stop Looking For Inspiration (Because Youre Gonna Need It)
Scorsese: One night I was watching late-night films on . . . I think it was
on Showtime. There was this film called Yeelen [1987]. The picture had
just started at 2:30 in the morning, and the image was very captivating,
and I watched the whole thing. I discovered that it was directed by
Souleymane Ciss and came from Mali. I got so excited. I had seen
Ousmane Sembnes films from Senegal-he was the first to put African
cinema on the map, in the 60s-but I hadnt seen anything quite like this .
. . the poetry of the film. Ive seen many, many movies over the years, and
there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to
continue to make films. This was one of them.
Spike Lee: So youre telling me that Martin Scorsese, the father of
cinema, needs inspiration to make more films?

Scorsese: Well, it gets you excited again. Sometimes when youre heavy
into the shooting or editing of a picture, you get to the point where you
dont know if you could ever do it again. Then suddenly you get excited
by seeing somebody elses work. So its been almost 20 years now with
the Film Foundation. Weve participated in restoring maybe 475
American films.
Thats from a conversation in Interview magazine between Spike Lee
and Martin Scorsese where an important distinction is made. Its easy to
see master filmmakers as endless wells of imagination, but stone
sharpens stone, and that well needs to be replenished. The key? No
matter how natural a storyteller, no matter how much experience, there
will always be a need to find that creative spark.
Youre Never Going to Get the Money You Want
I think theres only one or two films where Ive had all the financial
support I needed. All the rest, I wish Id had the money to shoot another
ten days.
This might seem obvious, but theres also something freeing about
knowing deep down that there will be very real limitations on trying to
achieve.
The flipside for fans is to keep in mind that most filmmakers (or at least
Scorsese) always creates a final product that could have used more time
and more money to make just a bit better. Perfection is out of reach, but
excellence is not.
Your Personal Story Matters
Scorseses movies are reflections of his past and his personality. He draws
a lot of script pages specifically from his time growing up in New York
and inside Catholicism from intimate experiences and curiosity. That
doesnt simply apply to subject matter. It also applies to tone:
Im not interested in a realistic look not at all, not ever. Every film
should look the way I feel.
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Curiously, in that same interview with Ebert, Scorsese discusses his use of
non-realistic elements including the fabled 48 frames per second used
to make De Niro in Taxi Driver look a monster, a robot, King Kong
coming to save Fay Wray
Watch These 85 Movies (and Then Watch More)
When Fast Company interviewed Scorsese after Hugos 11 Oscar
nominations, they got more than they bargained for. The director
referenced 85 different movies during their conversation, pulling out
specific lessons and influences from all. A lot of criticism was lobbed
toward the list because of what it doesnt include, but this is the stuff that
simply popped off the top of his head. Is there any doubt that these 85
flicks are a good starting point or that there are 850 more worthy of
learning from?
At any rate, Apocalypse Now and Arsenic and Old Lace make a hell of a
double feature.
Treat Everyone Equally On Set
I think its really the mood that he makes on the set He makes
everyone feel equal, no matter who you are, no matter how big you are,
no matter how famous you are, no matter how iconic you are you feel
equal to each other, Chloe Moretz on Scorsese
This is indicative of the kind of working environment that one of the best
directors on the planet creates. He can ensure that a teenage girl feels
comfortable and equal to the most seasoned person on set (which might
just be him).
Scorsese once talked about the idea of delegating care to people like
doctors and paramedics (in regards to Bringing Out the Dead). That we
farm out empathy so that others can singularly be responsible for taking
care of others, and how we had to resist the urge to close ourselves off to
those feelings. That connection to other people. He also talks often about
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bringing kindness to everything he makes. It may seem a bit touchyfeely, but the results speak for themselves.
Dont Be Afraid of Hands-On Research
Get in the taxi with Robert De Niro driving. Take a ride-along on an
ambulance. Have the experiences that will help make your story sing.
What Have We Learned
From Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore to Taxi Driver to Raging Bull,
Goodfellas, The Departed and Hugo, the best lessons from Martin
Scorsese seem to come loud and direct from the way he makes his
movies. They explore and question, all while celebrating the sheer magic
of cinema. Even the violence has a kind of care behind it, a deeper look
into the melted mind of a troubled man or the dark heart of a corrupt
underground.
Its funny, then, that Scorsese once famously named 85 movies that
influenced him, because as a director, hes given us 31 himself. Heres
hoping for at least 31 more.

The Movie Man: Martin Scorsese

There are few filmmakers who rival Martin Scorseses contribution to

cinema. The 69-year-old New Yorker is part of the passionate and highly
film-literate moviemakers (including Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De
Palma, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) that started their careers in
the 1970s during the New Hollywood era. These directors created the
modern blockbuster and came to define American cinema.
Whether making gangster films, period films or biopics, Scorsese
explores aspects of masculinity, identity and violence. His protagonists
are often loners in a chaotic world trying to make sense of the madness
around them, grappling with issues of guilt, penance and spiritual
enlightenment. Nostalgia plays a big part in Scorseses films, but so do
regret and loss. Many of his films end ambiguously, with a sense of irony
or with the main character on the decline. Frequently working with the
same crew, including editor Thelma Schoonmaker on almost every film,
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and the same actors (such as Robert De Niro and, more recently, Leonardo
DiCaprio), Scorsese is one of the few American auteurs, as his films can be
regarded as a personal expression of his author-like direction.
Many of Scorseses early films reflected his childhood as the son of
Catholic Italian immigrants living in New York. While attending film
school in the 1960s he made a handful of short films before making his
first feature, Whos That Knocking at My Door (1967). It starred his thenpreferred leading actor, Harvey Keitel, as a typically Scorsesesque
troubled man. The film contained some hallmarks of his later films with
its focus on Italian-American communities, life-on-the-street feel, and a
rock soundtrack. Following Boxcar Bertha (1972), which he made with
legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman, Scorsese made Mean
Streets(1973). This film announced his arrival as a filmmaker of note, and
was the first time Scorsese worked with De Niro, capturing the stories,
characters and atmosphere of Little Italy in New York City, where Scorsese
grew up.
After his under-appreciated Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore (1974), a
rare Scorsese film with a leading female protagonist (played by Ellen
Burstyn), he made his masterpiece. Taxi Driver (1976) featured De Niro as
an insomniac Vietnam veteran, Travis Bickle, who descends into violent
madness. The film coined the phrase are you talkin to me, inspired the
1981 assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan and remains
one of the greatest cinematic portrayals of paranoid psychosis. More
importantly, Taxi Driver established Scorseses favourite techniques of
using slow motion and fluid tracking shots to convey the subjective
experience of his protagonists.
Reflecting his love of different cinematic movements from all over the
world, a Scorsese film will often blend cinema-vrit techniques with the
dreamlike imagery of avant-garde films. These elements were stunningly
combined in Scorseses 1980 biopic, Raging Bull, with De Niro as the
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turbulent boxer Jake LaMotta. This black-and-white epic portrays

masculinity at its most violent, reprehensible, pitiful and tragic. Taxi
Driver might be the masterpiece, but Raging Bull is the definitive
Scorsese film.
Between Taxi Driver and Raging Bull Scorsese made the homage to
Hollywood musicals, New York, New York (1977) and a concert film of The
Band, The Last Waltz (1978).
Throughout his career, Scorseses love of music is expressed on his
soundtracks, which alternate between original scores by composers such
as Bernard Herrmann, Philip Glass and Peter Gabriel, and eclectic pop
and rock compilations. He also produced the 2003 documentary series,
The Blues, and has made documentaries about Bob Dylan (No Direction
Home; 2005), the Rolling Stones (Shine a Light; 2008) and most recently
George Harrison (Living in the Material World; 2011). He even directed
the Bad music video for Michael Jackson in 1987.
Scorseses 1980s films were slightly left-of-field ventures. And, with the
forgettable exception of The Color of Money (1986; a sequel to the Paul
Newman classic of 1961, The Hustler), they are fascinating. The King of
Comedy (1983) cast De Niro as a struggling comedian trying to get the
attention of a famous talk-show host, played by Jerry Lewis. Its Taxi Driver
as a critique of showbiz. After Hours (1985) was a low-budget surreal
comedy about a man in New York trying to get home one night. Of most
interest was The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), a highly controversial
film that depicted what Christs life may have been like if he didnt die on
the cross and lived as a mortal man. Despite accusations of blasphemy,
the film remains an extraordinary examination of spirituality and faith.
In 1990, Scorsese made the gangster masterpiece Goodfellas. Its classic
Scorsese: violent, focused on the Italian-American mob, ending with a
whimper rather than a bang, featuring De Niro among others, and full of
iconic music and visual flourishes. Following his 1991 remake of the
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1962 thriller Cape Fear, with De Niro playing the vengeful former convict
Max Cady, Scorsese made Casino (1995), which functioned as a sort of
unofficial but far more violent follow-up to Goodfellas. The final
conventional Scorsese film of the 1990s was Bringing out the
Dead(1999), where he teamed up with writer (and also director) Paul
Schrader for the forth and final time after previously collaborating on Taxi
Driver,Raging Bull and Last Temptation. Dead was an almost black comic
retelling of Taxi Driver, this time featuring an exhausted paramedic
played by Nicolas Cage.
After Goodfellas, the two standout 1990s films for Scorsese were the less
obvious The Age of Innocence (1993) and Kundun (1997). An adaptation
of Edith Whartons 1920 novel, Innocence did not seem like a typical
Scorsese film, but its New York setting and melancholic male protagonist,
Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), were Scorsese hallmarks. Likewise, a
film about the 14th Dalai Lama initially seemed an odd choice,
butKundun displayed Scorseses command of using film style to convey
the experience of a male protagonist in a world he struggles to
comprehend. Just as Scorseses other religiously themed film, Last
Temptation, attracted controversy, so did Kundun this time from the
Chinese Government, which wasnt pleased about a film depicting the
exiled Tibetan leader sympathetically.
The past decade has seen Scorsese repeatedly collaborate with actor
Leonardo DiCaprio, starting with the disappointing period crime
drama,Gangs of New York (2002). The directoractor partnership with
DiCaprio picked up in 2004 with the impressive biopic, The Aviator, about
the notoriously reclusive film producer and aviation pioneer, Howard
Hughes. In 2010 the pair worked together on Shutter Island, one of
Scorseses most misunderstood films (the complex, subjective film style
used to signal the true nature of DiCaprios US Marshal character was
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mistaken for giving away the twist ending, which was in fact not a twist
at all).
Scorseses 2000s peak came in 2006 with The Departed, a remake of the
2002 Hong Kong crime drama, Infernal Affairs. Once more full of
Scorseses trademark crime violence and psychopathic male
characters,The Departed was a complex film about identity and loyalty.
Some audiences were annoyed that Scorsese had remade a recent and
much loved Hong Kong film, while others preferred Scorseses less
melodramatic and more straightforward version. The Departed finally
earned Scorsese an Academy Award for Best Director (he had previously
been nominated five times).
The importance of what Scorsese has done for cinema cannot be
understated. Not only has he made numerous American classics, he has
also long campaigned for the need to preserve older films. He has made
documentaries about American and Italian cinema, and is endlessly
championing films from all over the world. He co-created the Film
Foundation in 1990, and the World Cinema Foundation in 2007 (both
organisations are dedicated to the preservation and restoration of films).
The man loves cinema, which is what is so beautifully expressed in his
latest 3D family film, Hugo (2011). Not only does Hugo celebrate the
wonders of films from a previous era, it introduces a whole new
generation to the joys of cinema. Unlike his many protagonists, Scorsese
is not about to fade into obscurity. Indeed, he is making films that are as
remarkable, inspirational and unpredictable as anything else he has
done during his extraordinary career.

Scorsese, pressionist

Shutter Island.
I was interested in the way she presented herself at that moment. Later
on I figured out that as she gets up from the chair we should do it in
three cuts, three separate close-ups, because I think hell never forget that
moment the rest of his life. Hell play it back many times. . . . Its just his
perception, his memory of what its going to be like. . . . We shot it very
quickly, two takes each, one at 24 frames, one at 36, and one 48.
Martin Scorsese, on filming The Age of Innocence.
Few directors think so carefully about how a film looks and sounds.
Sensitive to technique in the work of classic filmmakers, Martin Scorsese
has always tried to give each picture a vivid visual and auditory profile.
Although hes often praised for his realism (usually prefaced by the
adjective gritty), Scorsese is often a subjectively oriented director. This
quality goes beyond the justly celebrated performances of his actors. He
is unafraid to use unusual cinematic techniques to thrust us boldly into
the characters minds and emotions. In this effort he joins some great
cinematic traditions. No surprise there: He has an immediate sense that
film history hovers over every choice a director makes.
Spoilers loom out of the mist ahead.
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Inside out, outside in

[2]

Raskolnikov.
Once American filmmakers developed a model of visual storytelling in
the late 1910s, filmmakers elsewhere were surprisingly quick to push it
in more subjective directions. There emerged something like an
international division of techniques.
To convey inner experience, German directors of the 1910s and 1920s
worked principally on aspects of mise-en-sceneperformance, staging,
setting, lighting, costume, make-up, and the like. The classic example is
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in which the cutting and camerawork
are fairly conservative, but the setting and acting seek to convey a
madmans vision of the world.

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[3]

Caligari subjectivizes the characters surroundings, a process signaled

through warped perspectives and fantastically distorted settings.
This brand of visual contortion became the hallmark of what was called
German Expressionist cinema. Scholars argue about exactly what films
belong under that rubric, but Caligari, along with From Morn to Midnight
(1920) and Raskolnikov (1923, above), are pretty uncontroversial
examples of making the external world reflect the characters psychic
turmoil.
At the same period, French directors were also experimenting with
subjective cinema. But they tended to concentrate less on mise-en-scene
and more on what the camera could do to suggest both optical and
mental point of view. In the so-called French Impressionist school, we
find framings, angles, distorting lenses, changes of focus, slow-motion,
and other cinematographic techniques used to suggest characters
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mental states. Thus in Germaine Dulacs Smiling Madam Beudet (1923),

the downtrodden wife sees her husband as monstrous.
In El Dorado (1921) Marcel LHerbier uses a gauzy filter to suggest that
his heroine is distracted, before pulling it aside and letting her face come
into focus.
A little later, leading Soviet filmmakers made editing, not mise-en-scene
or camerawork, their most salient technique. They experimented with
graphic and rhythmic montage, as well as cuts that sacrificed spatial and
temporal continuity to eye-smiting impact.
Of course this three-way division of technical labor is too neat. You find
some camera experimentation in German Expressionism, as with the fast
motion in Nosferatu (1922). The French were using rapid cutting even
before the Soviets, as Gances La Roue (1923) shows. And some Soviets,
such as Eisenstein and the FEKS directors, explored unusual lighting and
camera angles. It should be said, though, that these shared techniques
often serve different purposes. Fast cutting in Impressionist films tends to
suggest the heightened experience of the characters, rather than serving,
as in the Soviet case, to dynamize a historical situation for the viewer. The
quick cutting in the carnival ride in Jean Epsteins Coeur fidle (1923)
simulates the chaotic burst of impressions felt by the characters, but the
quick cutting in the street riot of Strike (1925) doesnt mimic the
characters states but aims to arouse shock and suspense in us.
In any case, my technical division remains only a first approximation
toward understanding pretty complicated historical trends. The main
point is that both the German Expressionist and the French Impressionist
filmmakers of the 1920s were seeking to use particular film techniques
to give the audience a deeper sense of the characters sensory experience
and emotional states.
American cinema selectively adopted some of these tactics of lighting
and set design. In a blog entry [7] and a web essay [8], Ive written about
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William Cameron Menzies as one importer of the German approach. You

can see Expressionist touches inFoxs Mr. Moto movies [9]. Likewise, 1940s
films particularly enjoyed mimicking Impressionist camera tricks to
signal drunkenness, delirium, hallucination, and other altered states.
Hitchcocks Spellbound (1945) and Wilders Lost Weekend (1945) are
famous examples. Typically such Expressionist and Impressionist touches
were associated with crime, craziness, or genre stylization. Much of this
flagrant irrealism went out of A-pictures in the 1950s, but it survived in
horror and, interestingly, in the US avant-garde cinema of Deren,
Markopoulos, and others.
One of Scorseses contributions to the 1970s, I think, was to revive and
consolidate this legacy. While we were celebrating his films as victories
for urban realism and neo-Method acting, many of the movies were also
charged exercises in subjective cinema.

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Making streets mean, and meaningful

Taxi Driver.
From Mean Streets (1973) everyone remembers the aura of street-punk
camaraderie, the harsh turns of mood (usually triggered by Johnny Boys
recklessness), and the vibrancy of the neighborhood, with its social
hierarchy and rituals of bullying and bluff and negotiation. Alongside
these tokens of realism we find breathless grace notes, as when Charlie
glides through the club, a visual equivalent of his joy in being among
pals and sexy women. (The shot was made by having Keitel ride the dolly
instead of walking in front of it.)
This euphoria of this neo-Impressionist shot is counterbalanced later by
the Rubber Biscuit song, with Charlie now thoroughly drunk and floating
in grotesque frontal close-up before the floor rises up to kiss his head.
3]

Charlie has come in to the club announcing himself as Jesus, a pious

man to create order. Now this shot charts his fall from drunken

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exuberance into queasiness and mounting anxiety about Johnny Boys

debt.
More generally, Tonys club is given heavily unrealistic treatment through
slow-motion and faked slow-motion, along with character movement
synchronized with the music. If the camerawork mimics Charlies mental
states in Impressionist fashion, the ruby-red club lighting suggests his
erotic inflammation in a mildly Expressionist one.

Taxi Driver (1976) is Scorseses most famous venture into subjectivity.

From the first shot of the cab heaving through wafting vaporsteam?
smoke? sulfur fumes?we cut to a mans eyes, and then to dissolving
views of the city through a rainy windshield.
[18]

From the start Scorsese announces one of his most basic strategies: a
realistic motivation for expressionist effects. Its only rain, but shooting it
through the windshield and adding slow motion gives the streets an
otherworldly shimmer. As the neon dribbles down the glass, and we see
pedestrians moving through tinted clouds like hesitant ghosts, the mans
face becomes bathed in a red glowvaguely motivated as reflected from
the traffic light, but unrealistically saturated, as in the Mean Streetsclub.
We see the real New York, but filtered through the eyes of a man who
considers it an open sewer. The plot will soon lock us into his
consciousness more explicitly, through restricted point of view and voiceover diary extracts and crisp montages of the cruising cab. In addition,
the motifs introduced here, particularly purifying water and blips of light,
will become elaborated in the course of the movie. The general point,
however, is that Scorsese has updated Impressionist and Expressionist
tactics in order to reveal a mans mind through images.
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Qui tollis peccata mundi

Bringing Out the Dead.

In some films Scorsese plays things straighter, invoking subjectivity only
briefly. There are the prizefights and the visions of Vicki in Raging Bull
(1980), and the slipperier passages of fantasy in The King of Comedy
(1982). But other films plunge us deeply into subjectivity, forcing the
world through the filter of a driven characters sensibility.
For thoroughgoing efforts in this direction we can look to Bringing Out
the Dead (1999). In this movie about a paramedic haunted by spirits of
those unfortunates he might have saved, Scorsese along with
cinematographer Robert Richardson and production designer Dante
Ferretti reinvoke the nightmarish qualities of Taxi Driver. The exhilaration
Frank Pierce gets from saving lives is offset by his despair at gambling
with death every night. The result is another exercise in neoImpressionism and Expressionism.
Once again rain and light, objectively out there in the urban world,
become projections of the characters tormented psyche, thanks to
camera angle and framing. The windshield gives Franks face phantom
tears.
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Once again concrete shapes and colors, filtered through a moving

vehicle, are distorted to suggest the protagonists anxieties.

To measure Franks descent into desperation, the camera even follows the
ambulance upside down, or sideways.

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Scorsese ventures into full-blown Expressionism as well. There are

naturally dream sequences, but we also get the unforgettable image of
the drug dealer Sy, impaled on a fence rail and reaching toward
skyscrapers as fireworks (real fireworks?) consecrate his gesture. Later,
hurtling through the city and moving closer to mental breakdown, Frank
starts to see every woman on the street as Rosa, the woman he could not
rescue. How the Germans would have loved having CGI available for such
a hallucination.

Perhaps the subtlest touches are the patches of blown-out white. At first
they seem a signal of death, gleaming off the bodies of Marys father and
the young man found on the street.
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In the final scene, Frank tells Mary of her fathers death (and sees her as
Rosa). She invites him in and eventually he falls asleep in her arms. The
final shot quietly shifts from a normal, rather dark texture, to one
endowing his shirt with a blinding glow.

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This change in lighting and exposure, unmotivated by any realistic

source, suggests that Frank feels he has found a bit of peace, while also
hinting that a spiritual radiance has entered this unhappy world through
a tortured secular saint.
Shutter Island caters to the pressionist side of Scorseses vision. It hovers
between realism and subjectivity: parts of what we see are really
happening in the fiction, while other parts are wholly in Teddy/ Edwards
mind. The difference is that here the balance tips strongly toward
expressionism. Apart from the dream sequences, certain hallucinations
are rendered in undistorted terms. So, for instance, scenes like the cave
conversation with the second Rachel Solando are wholly Teddys mental
projections. Other scenes oscillate between subjectivity and objectivity, as
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when Teddy is preparing to set fire to Cawleys car and talks with his wife
Doloresalthough the next shot confirms shes not really there.

I find all this less resourceful than the virtuosic ways in which Scorsese
subjectivizes the neighborhoods of New York. The Gothic trappings of the
hospital, the cagelike wards, and the rainswept island offer less
opportunity for novel stylization than an urban landscape. Moreover, I
think that the creaky gimmick ruling the plot of Shutter Island relies on
farfetched explanations and leaves too many loose ends. If the storm
didnt really occur, as Dr. Cawley tells us, then did the storm-tossed
dialogues with Chuck not occur either? Why are the doctors talking about
the prospects of a (nonexistent) flood before Teddy even comes into the
room? And could the inmates be relied upon to execute the physicians
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complex role-playing game? A second viewing left me in the dark about

matters that a Shyamalan would have tidied up.
But I did have to admire the way in which Scorsese uses Teddys
breakdown as an alibi for the mismatched cuts Ive objected to before. [30]
(Some legerdemain with a water glass is particularly clever.) And the
ending supplies one further twist that somewhat ennobles the whole
loopy contraption.
Cranking it up

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[32]

Crank 2: High Voltage.

You can argue that Scorseses talent was well suited to this project: We
dont notice the plot problems because his stylistic assurance carries us
along smoothly. That assurance allows me to raise my final point.
Ive argued elsewhere, in books and on this site [33], that Hollywood
storytelling techniques have been overhauled in recent decades. Over
the last forty years or so, filmmakers have amped up the continuity style
forged in the 1910s. They have cut faster, sometimes averaging 2-3
seconds per shot across a film. They have relied more heavily on singles
(shots of one character), and these singles are often fairly large close-ups.
Directors have also embraced extremes in lens lengthsvery long lenses
(for that perspective-flattening effect) and very wide-angle ones (often
yielding flagrant distortions). Filmmakers have also relied a great deal on
camera movement, frequently tracking in or out or even circling around
the characters as they speak. The basic premises of continuity cinema
arent violated, but the result is more aggressive visuals. Hence my label
intensified continuity.
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I think that intensified continuity became the new baseline for popular
filmmaking both in the US and overseas. Over this style, however, some
filmmakers have laid lots of fancy filigree. Many flashy techniques fill our
movies. We get slow-motion, fast-motion, reverse-motion, ramping, and
freeze-frames. There are brutal jump cuts, ragged shifts between color
and monochrome, deliberately awkward framings, abrupt overhead
compositions, slippery focus, and jerky handheld shooting. On the
soundtrack we get ominous rumblings, metallic crashes, and noisy
transitions. The Bourne films and The Hurt Locker (2009) offer moderate
examples, but edging toward the extreme you have Crank 2: High
Voltage (2009). Here intensified continuity has itself been intensified to a
height of frenzied artifice. Over the top doesnt capture it. There is, it
seems, no longer a top to go over.
This swaggering style takes classical space and time as its basiswe still
have analytical cutting, over-the-shoulder shots, and the likebut it
pushes beyond the modest demands of simply laying out dramatic
elements for easy comprehension. The intensified approach, itself trying
for punch, has been raised to a new level of shock and awe. This trend, Id
speculate, is an escalation of tendencies seen in 1970s-1980s
filmmakers like Brian De Palma, Ken Russell, Nicholas Roeg, Ridley Scott,
and Scorsese.
Scorseses technical lan proved enormously influential, I think; Mean
Streets is virtually a compendium of the new techniques. But unlike
some others, he explored the emerging style in order to probe characters
feelings and moods. Many of todays amped-up techniques come off as
merely eye candy, or prods for visual arousal, or pieces of narrational
subterfuge (as often in De Palma). Scorsese has sought to make these
decorative techniques more operaticperhaps in the tradition of Visconti,
Michael Powell, and other filmmakers he admires. The images (and of
course the music) swirl around the action, providing cadenzas that bring
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out feelings which his men often cant articulate. Sometimes the stylistic
accompaniment becomes bombastic, as I think Shutter Island largely is.
Yet the finest of Scorseses pictures contribute to a rich tradition in which
the cinema, normally committed to objective realism, makes palpable
what goes on inside us.
Scorseses remarks on The Age of Innocence come from a Film Comment
interview with Gavin Smith reprinted in Martin Scorsese Interviews [34],
ed. Peter Brunette (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 200.
For more on Expressionist and Impressionist silent cinema, see our Film
History: An Introduction, Chapters 4 and 5. By the end of the 1920s,
these tendencies and Soviet Montage were blending into a sort of
international style, a development considered in Chapter 8.

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