A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies | movie | 1995 | Official Featurette - video Dailymotion

Martin Scorsese celebrates American movies from the silent classics to the Hollywood of the seventies. | dG1fVmdBT2tTeGgzMUE

Transcript

00:00 My BFI Player Plus choice this week is A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,

00:05 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,

00:14 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.

00:31 Presented in three parts, originally broadcast on Channel 4 back in the mid-90s,

00:37 A Personal Journey finds Scorsese looking at the director as a storyteller, smuggler,

00:41 illusionist and iconoclast. From Chaplin, Griffith and Murnau, through Minnelli and Kazan,

00:46 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.

01:04 I remember quite clearly it was 1946 and I was four years old. My mother took me to see

01:09 King Bidor's Duel in the Sun. Beginning with the so-called director's dilemma, the long-standing

01:14 conflict between art and commerce in the costly business of making movies, Scorsese examines the

01:19 way in which the advent of sound, colour and widescreen formats changed the nature of cinematic

01:24 storytelling and digs into the subversive agendas of directors like Nick Ray and Orson Welles,

01:29 who used the medium to provoke debate and change. Like Mark Cousins' more wide-ranging The Story of Film,

01:35 Scorsese's Personal Journey is littered with ravishing film clips, from silent classics

01:40 such as Intolerance and Sunrise, to the western sweep of The Searchers, the broiling tension of

01:45 Public Enemy and the sublime science fiction of 2001. The series takes us up to the dawn of the

01:50 so-called New Hollywood, the movement with which Scorsese was inextricably bound up.

01:55 From the low-budget 60s feature Who's That Knocking at My Door to such 21st century hits as The Departed,

02:01 Shutter Island, Hugo and Silence, Scorsese continues to be at the cutting edge of cinema.

02:07 Who better to guide you through the magic of the movies?

02:10 [Music]

02:15 [Silence]