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Scorsese Auteur By the end of the 1990 s, Martin Scorsese was recognized as one of the most significant of American film directors. His uncompromising cinematic examination of New York Citys underbelly, beginning with Mean Streets, has exerted a profound cultural influence on cinema goers and filmmakers. The fact that he was not much recognized by the Academy Awards, indeed, adds to rather than detracts from his reputation; after all, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick were also all denied Oscars (Sight and Sound, 1992). He became acclaimed by both filmmakers and critics.
His films were recognized as the high watermarks of three decades of filmmaking excellence, and help him to emerge as the most consistently powerful and provocative film director of his generation. This particular paper is going to focus on Martin Scorsese as an auteur. It will be also examined how the directors character is reflected in his films as well as films are impacted by his nature, manner and style. Scorsese's own background provided the fertile soil in which his filmmaking ambitions took root. Born in New York to a first generation Italian-American family, he grew up in Manhattan's Little Italy, the setting of his first full-length features. A sickly child, much confined indoors by asthma, he became addicted to movies at an early age.
In the 1960 s, he abandoned ambitions to become a Catholic priest and joined the New York University film school, where he wrote and directed several award-winning shorts. Analyzing his works now one can conclude that Scorsese's upbringing in childhood, surrounding atmosphere, and his personal psyche are the crucial determinants for his art. Although Martin Scorsese started his career of professional director in the end of 60 s, the first success came to him with Taxi Driver in 1976. Many critics truly believed that the major theme of Taxi Driver is the angst felt throughout America in the post-Vietnam era. Scorsese positioned his movie as a psychological drama and a tale of alienation, displaced sexuality, and life in the big city (). Scorsese's work has always characterized with energetic, and violent protagonists, which tend to be driven toward public recognition.
Travis Bible is no exception. Travis portrayed in Taxi Driver as a Vietnam-era vet who yearns to be somebody but only succeeds in becoming increasingly deranged and lonely as the film progresses. Set in New York City, Taxi Driver traces the daily habits of Travis as he drives his cab through the city, working long hours to avoid the monotony of his life. This is very natural for everyone to experience such periods. Being a creative person, Scorsese himself was looking for inspiration, diving into the routine of daily life. The film opens with shots of De Niro's eyes looking at the world from behind the glass windshield of his cab, calling to mind his isolation from society, which becomes magnified with time.
Travis life changes when he falls for a political campaign manager named Betsy. Betsy's rejection of Travis instigates his obsession with guns and fixation with the idea of rescuing a teen-age prostitute he meets in his cab. Travis simultaneously destroys his body with drugs, alcohol, and junk food, and yearns to get himself into shape and to get his life organized. These two poles of his personality are best illustrated by an infamous scene in which Travis has a standoff with his mirror image (). Travis looks at himself in the mirror and utters the most frequently quoted lines in the film: You talking to me?
You talking to me? You talking to me? ... Well Im the only one here. Director skillfully employs am image of mirror to emphasize the split of personality inside the main hero.
This scene enacts the construction, rehearsal, and performance of masculinity. In the privacy of his own room, Travis practices the role of the type of man he would like to be and calls to mind the anxiety embedded in the process of striving for this masculine ideal in the American post-Vietnam era (). Martin Scorsese grew up on the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, that is why the peculiar symbolism of famous English director is widely employed in Taxi Driver (). Additionally, like many of Hitchcock's films, Taxi Driver is a film about making movies. In a direct reference to Hitchcock, Scorsese appears in a shot at the beginning of the film. He later acts in a scene in which he and De Niro gaze at the silhouette of a woman through an apartment window.
The cinematic spectator is continually addressed by shots of De Niro watching movies, films, projectors, the gazes of secret service men through photographic lenses, Travis mirror, and the car window through which Travis experiences much of the world. Director Martin Scorsese grew up in an Italian-American community in Little Italy. He entered a seminary after grammar school only to be asked to leave at the age of fourteen after falling in love with a girl. Scorsese attributes much of his cinematic fascination with issues of family loyalty, hierarchy, and spirituality to his early years in Catholic school. His 1990 s films such as Goodfellas and Casino, and standards such as Raging Bull and Mean Streets point to his continuing interest in exploring stereotypes of Italian-Americans through mafia narratives (). When Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese's biopic of 1940 s middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta, premiered in November of 1980, critics and audiences alike hailed it as a masterpiece.
The films expressionistic black-and-white photography, its lyrical realism, and Robert De Niro's stunning performance gave it an expressive power of great magnitude. However, many critics, most notably Pauline Kael, film critic for the New Yorker magazine, were uncomfortable with the film, wondering if La Motta - a violent, troubled wife-abusing lout - was worthy of the spiritual transformation Scorsese attributed to him (). Scorsese undertook the film at a time of crisis in his career. His previous feature, New York, New York, had been a critical and commercial bomb. Scorsese was so demoralized by its failure that he embarked on a debauch of epic length, resulting in his 1978 hospitalization ().
The picture Scorsese envisioned would be a meditation on the Catholic themes that had inspired his best work of the 1970 s: redemption, alienation, morality, and guilt. It would be at once a wholly personal work and a revision of the 1940 s movies he had loved as a child. It is the tension generated between the formal aspects of the picture - the stylized black-and-white photography, at times documentary, like in execution, and the subject matter that gives Raging Bull its almost hallucinatory ferocity (). What De Niro does in this picture isnt acting, exactly, wrote Pauline Kael, who for the most part took a pejorative view of the films excesses. Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isnt pleasurable (). From the critical point of view, she was right.
In fact, De Niro's portrayal is so harrowing that every moment he is onscreen is excruciatingly tense. Scorsese's La Motta is a violent, self-centered, egotistical man, a man possessed by uncontrollable paranoia (). And like his sobriquet, The Bronx Bull, La Motta is bullish. But, as the film begins in medias res, the audience never learns the reasons for Lamotta's obstinate behavior, only that it is his fatal flaw, the chink in his armor. Because of his intransigence in dealing with a local mob boss, he remains a contender for years, unable to gain a shot at the title. But only after acquiescing to mob demands - to throw a fight - does he get his chance at the championship.
In his final boxing match - against his old enemy, Sugar Ray Robinson - La Motta is virtually crucified on the ropes, taking a brutal beating while refusing to go down. With his face reduced to a bleeding pulp, he taunts the victor, repeating, You never got me down, Ray, in an infantile chant (). Retired in Florida, La Motta has become an obese parody of himself, presiding over a Miami nightclub where he introduces the acts with a crass version of suave nightclub patter. Indeed, things fall apart: his long-suffering wife leaves him and he is eventually arrested on a morals charge. In a pivotal scene, he retrieves his championship belt, attacking it with a hammer to dislodge the gems he needs for bail money, mindlessly deforming the belt as he has destroyed his life. This allegory employed by Scorsese critics labeled a symbol for Cameron's sinking lemon in a cup of tea ().
Finally, locked in solitary confinement, La Motta reaches a crisis, attacking his confinement, banging his head against the wall, kicking and punching it in anger and frustration, his body half in shadow and half in light. Why, you " re so stupid, an animal, he screams. Finally he collapses, sobbing, I wasnt that bad. As he cries, a piece of his sleeve catches a beam of light in the darkened cell. It is one of Scorsese's most transcendent moments, perfectly blending religious metaphor with film language ().
The film closes as it had begun, with La Motta, now a nightclub entertainer, practicing Marlon Brandos I shoulda been a contender speech - from On the Waterfront - in front of his dressing-room mirror. And again mirror, and again two different characters. He has achieved a measure of peace. Something is now apparent than was not clear in the first scene, where La Motta appeared a figure of ridicule, butchering Shakespeare with his ludicrous Bronx accent: looking at his face in the mirror, he says, Lets face it, it was you, it was you () Scorsese told an interviewer at the time of Raging Bulls release that those who think its a boxing picture would be out their minds. Its brutal, sure, but it is a brutality that could take place not only in the boxing ring, but in the bedroom or in an office (). Because the film speaks on the level of the specific and the universal notion of mans craving for redemption, its brilliance affects one at a visceral level.
As a child, Scorsese had been taught to hate the sin, but love the sinner. Perhaps no other film so complexly embodies this basic philosophy. Raging Bull was the culmination of one of several cycles in Scorsese's work, a cycle preoccupied with, in the words of Paul Schrader, a sense of guilt, redemption by blood, and moral purpose (). GoodFellas became another continuation of American-Italian...
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