The filmmakers Joni Mitchell called “magnificent”
When we think of the folk artists who defined the 1960s and 1970s, Joni Mitchell’s name always crops up as one of the finest musicians to occupy the genre. Blending a love of pop and jazz arrangements into her music as the years progressed, Mitchell never stuck to one rigid style, with her approach always fluid and inherently poetic.
The musician rose to prominence in the late 1960s after moving from Canada to the United States, where she began to involve herself in local folk scenes, eventually releasing her debut album in 1968, Song to a Seagull. Her work as a songwriter helped to raise her profile, with her song ‘Both Sides, Now’ – one of her greatest hits – originally made popular by Judy Collins.
Mitchell found more success with the likes of Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, and of course, Blue, the seminal recording that firmly cemented the singer’s place in the halls of folk fame. Featuring songs like ‘California’ and ‘A Case of You’, Blue is a special album to many, although Mitchell soon went on to release albums like Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, both of which were incredibly successful too, with the former remaining her most commercially successful record.
By the end of the decade, Mitchell was one of America’s most celebrated musicians, and having built various strong connections with her contemporaries, she appeared in the concert film The Last Waltz, with The Band playing their final performance alongside many notable guests.
Directed by Martin Scorsese, who had risen to prominence that decade with movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, the concert film received widespread praise. Mitchell reflected on her experience of being in the film in an interview with New York Magazine, hailing Scorsese and his frequent editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, as “magnificent”.
While she admitted that “I really didn’t see Martin. I was the only woman there; they added a couple of women after the fact. So that was strange—it was like being a girl on a football team,” she then heaped praise on him and his longtime collaborator. “I think Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker technically are magnificent. She’s the best editor in the world. In terms of editing and constructing a film, they’re at the zenith.”
Scorsese and Schoonmaker met in 1963, and she edited his debut feature, Who’s That Knocking at my Door, a few years later, before the pair worked as editors on the concert film Woodstock in 1970. While Schoonmaker didn’t edit any of Scorsese’s films again until 1980’s Raging Bull, which she won an Oscar for, she has edited every movie he has ever made since, making her one of his most reliable collaborators.
Evidently, their collaborations have attracted Mitchell, although she also has some other filmmakers, revealing them in the same interview: “I love [Federico] Fellini. I like the Russian filmmaker [Andrei] Tarkovsky. I like some of the French New Wave, though sometimes the movies were boring and I just watched the clothes; they had these great fashions by Coco Chanel. My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I’m a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, ‘Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!’ and I took that as a great compliment. That’s exactly my intention.’”
