The documentary that shaped Martin Scorsese’s filmmaking
His narrative features may have gathered the most headlines and secured his status as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, but Martin Scorsese‘s filmography also showcases beyond doubt that he’s one of the finest documentarians out there.
Since 1966’s New York City… Melting Point – his feature-length directorial debut of any kind – Scorsese has gone on to helm a further 15 documentaries covering a wide array of subjects, from The Band’s The Last Waltz, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones’ Shine a Light to Eliza Kazan retrospective A Letter to Elia, neorealist deep dive My Voyage to Italy, and Franz Lebowitz profile Public Speaking.
None of his 14 Academy Award nominations emerged as a result, though, but during the formative stages of his career, he was involved in one of the most famous documentaries of its era. 1970’s Woodstock told the story of the legendary counterculture festival, and Scorsese was just one of seven editors enlisted by director Michael Wadleigh.
The project would reunite him with Thelma Schoonmaker in what was only their second collaboration, with his soon-to-be editorial muse having cut Scorsese’s debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door before becoming his full-time and permanent associate beginning with Raging Bull in 1980.
Scorsese had already helmed two movies and a documentary of his own at that point, but his contributions to Woodstock played a huge part in shaping him into the filmmaker he would become. As crew member Hart Perry put it to Rolling Stone when recalling an incident when a tent collapsed on the aspiring director: “He wasn’t Martin Scorsese yet; he was just some schmuck from Little Italy”.
As well as giving him a taste of working on a large-scale documentary, the massive amounts of footage required the assembled editors to utilise freeze frames and superimpositions as means of innovatively creating the film’s visual language, both of which would become signature techniques anytime Scorsese and Schoonmaker would reunite to cut together one of the former’s films over the course of the next half a century.
Woodstock‘s use of split screen is still held up as one of the most famous examples of the technique and helped usher it in as a trend throughout the remainder of the 1970s. The old saying offers that necessity is the mother of invention for a reason, with the seven-strong team dipping into their bag of tricks to cobble the 185-minute documentary together in a manner that would go on to have a huge influence on Scorsese when he permanently stepped away from the editing room to focus solely on his work behind the camera.
Scorsese’s next dalliance with feature-length documentaries post-Woodstock came in The Last Waltz, with the steep learning curve he was forced to contend with last time out putting him in the perfect position to craft one of the finest concert films ever made.
