The talented filmmakers Martin Scorsese believes reinvented cinema
The greatest directors in the history of cinema aren’t necessarily obliged to completely reinvent the medium, and as blasphemous as it may sound without proper explanation, Martin Scorsese is one of the finest examples.
Obviously, it would be beyond idiotic to say that he hasn’t helmed a litany of indisputable classics dating back decades, because he has. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Silence, The King of Comedy, and The Last Temptation of Christ are just a selection of the titles that will be lauded for generations to come as some of the most daring, evocative, riveting, and immaturely constructed motion pictures there’s ever been.
However, on the other side of the coin, it would also be fair to suggest that Scorsese hasn’t made a career of ripping up the conventions of cinema and rebuilding them in his own image. He’s one of the best, most talented, and acclaimed filmmakers to have ever picked up a megaphone and stepped behind a camera, but even he wouldn’t name himself among the rare collection of talents to have completely reinvented the concept of what cinema could be.
As a lifelong cinephile and keen student of celluloid, Scorsese’s influences and inspirations have been vast, all-encompassing, and plucked from the halls of greatness. With that in mind, the names listed by such a titanic presence as those to have done what nobody else has done before or since carry extra weight, and it’s not as if he’s wrong, either.
There’s one glaring omission from the icons the Academy Award winner outlined to Harper’s Bazaar as the cream of the crop, though, if only because Scorsese has gone on record multiple times with his adulation for Akira Kurosawa. The Seven Samurai creator doesn’t make the cut, then, but it can’t be said the ones who did aren’t among the greatest of greats.
Scorsese described them as those who “were constantly grappling with the question, ‘What is cinema?’, and then throwing it back for the next film to answer.” In his eyes, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Shōhei Imamura, John Cassavetes, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Andy Warhol, and Satyajit Ray “were reinventing cinema with each new camera movement and cut”.
As a result, “more established filmmakers”, including Orson Welles, John Huston, Luchino Visconti, and Robert Bresson, “were re-energised by the surge in creativity around them”. However, there was “one director whom everyone knew” who existed on a plane all of their own, who Scorsese called the “one artist whose name was synonymous with cinema and what it could do”.
That person was Federico Fellini, “a name that instantly evoked a certain style, a certain attitude toward the world.” It’s never been a secret that Scorsese is a huge fan of those aforementioned names and has regularly praised them as cinematic touchstones, but his admiration for Fellini runs so deeply that he’ll gladly put him on a pedestal of his own.
