Martin Scorsese is perhaps the most open filmmaker. Unlike
directors such as John Ford, who scoffed at questions about
filmmaking technique, Scorsese has a history of talking about his
techniques and influences.
Scorsese’s older films will be screened along with films
that influenced him in a series beginning at the James Bridges
Theater on Thursday. It’s a journey from his early short
films through his acclaimed work with Robert De Niro.
Robert Rosen, dean of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and
Television, has worked with Scorsese for over a decade through the
Film Foundation. The organization was co-founded by Rosen and
Scorsese and includes board members like Robert Redford, Steven
Spielberg, George Lucas, Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.
Rosen has seen Scorsese’s passion first-hand.
“What do world famous directors talk about when they get
together in an informal way? The answer is they talk about the
history of film, great scenes,” Rosen said regarding his trip
with Scorsese to the home of his friend, Spielberg.
“The discussion was about some wonderful camera move that
existed in the early days of sound, when cameras weren’t
supposed to move,” Rosen added.
You can see that passion in the last scene in
“Goodfellas,” where Joe Pesci shoots a gun into the
screen, a technique used in Edwin Porter’s 1903 silent film
“The Great Train Robbery.” You can see it in the subway
gang warfare of the Michael Jackson music video “Bad”
(also screening Thursday), which Scorsese directed as a homage to
1961’s “West Side Story.”
Scorsese is well-known for his violent, gritty films, many of
them starring De Niro, including “Mean Streets,”
“Raging Bull,” “Taxi Driver” and
“Goodfellas.” Yet the recent Scorsese has been devoted
to a different side of life, one involving the larger sweep of
history hinted at in “Goodfellas.” Scorsese has delved
into pacifist religious figures (Jesus in “The Last
Temptation of Christ” and the Dalai Lama in
“Kundun”) and repressed genteel society (“The Age
of Innocence”), both involving worlds very different from
that of the alleycats of New York.
The UCLA retrospective comes at a time when Scorsese is perhaps
at his most high profile with the recent opening of “Gangs of
New York,” a $100 million-plus epic of a largely unsung part
of American history. It’s a fusion of his older gangster
films with his more recent interest in epic history.
“The ambition and the ability to pull it off, that canvas
writ-large is not easy,” said Cheng-Sim Lim, co-head of
programming at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, about the
film’s telescopic view of history a la Stanley
Kubrick’s “2001” and D. W. Griffith’s
“Intolerance.” “What director today in America
has the ambition and knowledge of film history to even think that
way? Very few.”
Scorsese had been wanting to shoot “Gangs of New
York” for 30 years, but hasn’t been able to amass the
funding until now. According to Pendleton, the eclectic Scorsese
was comfortable doing smaller projects like “After
Hours” after “Raging Bull” was a box office
failure. He even gained credibility by working on standard
Hollywood fare with “The Color of Money,” which starred
Tom Cruise and won Paul Newman an Oscar.
“When Scorsese does these films on a broad canvas,
it’s because it’s one of the things he wants to do and
he’s doing that when he can,” Pendleton said.
“Right now, he’s famous enough to do that.”
Scorsese also hopes to use his resources to bring attention to
the films that impacted him, represented in the retrospective
through screenings of “Murder By Contract” (which
influenced “Taxi Driver”), Fellini’s “I
Vitelloni” (which influenced “Mean Streets”), and
“The Man I Love” (a Hollywood musical which informed
Scorsese’s own “New York, New York”). The
director’s predilection toward the past has helped him make a
distinct impact on the present, from editing and camera techniques
adopted by MTV music videos to raw depictions of street punks later
seen in films like “Menace To Society.”
“Scorsese has an encyclopedic knowledge of not only
American films, but global cinema,” Rosen said. “He
draws on that knowledge in his creative work in the
present.”
For more info, call (310) 206-8013 or log onto
www.cinema.ucla.edu.