This video essay examines Thelma Schoonmaker’s key contributions to Martin Scorsese’s work by taking a closer look at two scenes from Raging Bull. Bonus: footage of the Scorsese exhibition currently on display at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.

Martin Scorsese famously considered becoming a priest before taking another path, and he clearly never lost the evangelical impulse. In the 38 years since Scorsese used his influence and finances to restore and rerelease Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, he has done more to spread the gospel of cinema than any other director in film history, devoting countless hours to film preservation and education while simultaneously amassing a body of work that in its breadth, depth, and quality rivals that of any of the masters his scholarly efforts aspire to honor. In 2007 Scorsese embarked on one of his most important […]

This video by Leigh Singer assembles Martin Scorsese’s many on-screen appearances in his own films.

This new video essay by Leigh Singer from the BFI posits, not so controversially, that director Martin Scorsese and the location of New York City are one of cinema’s great screen couples: This video essay focuses exclusively on Scorsese’s features and argues that, in his hands, the physical place transforms into psychological space: an X-ray not just of a city’s psyche, but of a nation’s soul. It makes for often brutal viewing, rarely indulging the aspirational side of the American Dream (does the Statue of Liberty feature even once in a Scorsese film?); but few can deny its authenticity. And […]

With Silence out soon, it’s Martin Scorsese season. This video essay by Cole Smith looks at Elia Kazan’s approach to staging interior and urban spaces in films such as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, then moves on to consider his influence on Scorsese’s The Departed. New Yorkers: the film shows on 35mm this Saturday at the Museum of the Moving Image. 

From faces to guns to cocaine to pasta sauce, the fast dolly zoom-in is one of Martin Scorsese’s go-to expressive camera moves. Here, Jorge Luengo Ruiz compiles four-minutes of them in what is both great mid-day cinematic eye candy as well as something of a critique. Ruiz writes: Martin Scorsese’s penchant for a specific kind of zoom, one where he runs the camera right up to the face of his subject, falls somewhere in between the subtle and the obnoxious. Seduced as we are by the style and panache of Scorsese’s oeuvre, we let this habit of his pass us […]

From 2001, it’s Martin Scorsese discussing Stanley Kubrick with Charlie Rose. They start with The Shining and go from there.

At New York’s School for the Visual Arts last Friday, Martin Scorsese spoke in remembrance of the late Abbas Kiarostami. He’d known him for some 14 years, and in this speech recalls both the last time they met — when they spoke about collaborating on a project next year — and the first, when they were both serving as Cinefondation honorary presidents at Cannes in 2002. Of Close-Up, he recalls how the film helped him “see the world again.”

With the release of De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s documentary on Brian De Palma and his work, and Metrograph’s continuing De Palma retrospective, material reflecting on the filmmaker’s career continues to surface. This episode of The Dick Cavett Show from 1978 provides candid insight into the work of both De Palma and Martin Scorsese. Scorsese himself introduced De Palma at the DGA New York Theater on June 10. In the discussion the two reflect on their working relationship, with De Palma declaring that the two “tend to be each other’s toughest critics.” When asked about differences in their working process, De Palma answers: “I […]