The Italian movie that showed Martin Scorsese “the power of cinema”
Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest auteurs working today, responsible for creating a legendary body of films which have mesmerised fans worldwide. The sheer scale of his impressive filmography is barely matched by any working director, and the dept of that resume is unstoppably imposing. Scorsese has become such an icon in cinema that his latest releases are awaited like arrivals from the cosmos, with each new movie finding their way into a new realm of moviemaking.
A major figure during the New Hollywood movement in the US, Scorsese has continued to further his art through recent productions such as The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. To be a great director is one thing, but to change the shape of cinema is another, and nobody can doubt that he has achieved such a feat.
While Scorsese has influenced popular cinema discourse in many ways, the director has also been involved in crucial film restoration efforts. Scorsese’s film foundation has worked tirelessly to preserve classics from various countries, which would have been lost forever had it not been for them.
Every now and then, Scorsese makes essential lists of films every aspiring filmmaker should watch to improve their film education. During a conversation with Criterion, the acclaimed director narrowed his choices down to ten masterpieces while talking about the films that have inspired him to make movies.
Scorsese selected the 1946 masterpiece Paisan by Roberto Rossellini as his number one pick before listing the works of auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini. While commenting on the brilliance of Paisan, Scorsese said: “I was experiencing the power of cinema itself, in this case made far beyond Hollywood, under extremely tough conditions and with inferior equipment”.
The second addition to Rossellini’s iconic war trilogy, Paisan chronicles the period during the Second World War when the Nazi army was losing the battle against Allied forces. It is a definitive masterpiece from the Italian neorealist movement, incorporating the characteristic frameworks of neorealist drama.
“I was also seeing that cinema wasn’t just about the movie itself but the relationship between the movie and its audience,” Scorsese added. “Fellini said that when Rossellini was filming the Po Valley sequence, he acted on pure instinct, inventing freely as he went along.”
That scene remained embedded in Scorsese’s mind and inspired his imagination. He concluded: “The result—in that episode, and in the Sicilian and Neapolitan and Florentine episodes as well—is still startling: it’s like seeing reality itself unfolding before your eyes.”
