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A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies | movie | 1995 | Official Featurette
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10/2/2023
Martin Scorsese celebrates American movies from the silent classics to the Hollywood of the seventies. | dG1fVmdBT2tTeGgzMUE
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Short film
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00:00
My BFI Player Plus choice this week is A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,
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a superb documentary series produced by the BFI as part of their Century of Cinema celebrations,
00:10
which serves as a companion piece to the current Scorsese season,
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which sees Goodfellas and Taxi Driver back in UK cinemas.
00:17
Film is a disease, Frank Capra said. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the
00:23
number one hormone. It plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film.
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Presented in three parts, originally broadcast on Channel 4 back in the mid-90s,
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A Personal Journey finds Scorsese looking at the director as a storyteller, smuggler,
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illusionist and iconoclast. From Chaplin, Griffith and Murnau, through Minnelli and Kazan,
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to Peckinpah, Penn and Kubrick, the series finds Scorsese paying tribute to the filmmakers he
00:51
loved and emphasising the need to look at old movies, providing both a lively primer on the
00:57
history of stateside cinema and also a personal insight into the influences which define Scorsese's own movies.
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I remember quite clearly it was 1946 and I was four years old. My mother took me to see
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King Bidor's Duel in the Sun. Beginning with the so-called director's dilemma, the long-standing
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conflict between art and commerce in the costly business of making movies, Scorsese examines the
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way in which the advent of sound, colour and widescreen formats changed the nature of cinematic
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storytelling and digs into the subversive agendas of directors like Nick Ray and Orson Welles,
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who used the medium to provoke debate and change. Like Mark Cousins' more wide-ranging The Story of Film,
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Scorsese's Personal Journey is littered with ravishing film clips, from silent classics
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such as Intolerance and Sunrise, to the western sweep of The Searchers, the broiling tension of
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Public Enemy and the sublime science fiction of 2001. The series takes us up to the dawn of the
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so-called New Hollywood, the movement with which Scorsese was inextricably bound up.
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From the low-budget 60s feature Who's That Knocking at My Door to such 21st century hits as The Departed,
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Shutter Island, Hugo and Silence, Scorsese continues to be at the cutting edge of cinema.
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Who better to guide you through the magic of the movies?
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[Music]
02:15
[Silence]
Recommended
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