The 1930s filmmaking duo Martin Scorsese considers to be out of everyone’s league: “Truly experimental films”
When Martin Scorsese made his directorial debut with Who’s That Knocking at My Door in 1967, he was met with fairly positive reviews, but no one could anticipate the legendary run of films he’d come to harness in the coming years.
Scorsese is one of the few directors to truly endure over a long period of time, his roots in the New Hollywood era of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s cementing him as a key player during a turning point for mainstream cinema, a place in the industry that he still maintains all these years later.
Balancing commercial accessibility with real artistry, the director has made some genre-defining films in his time, from the biographical sports drama Raging Bull to the gangster classic Goodfellas, which naturally makes you wonder how he developed such skill.
His time at the Tisch School of the Arts certainly helped, where he was able to create some of his first short films, as did his innate creative impulses, which guided him towards such ambitious ideas, but then there’s the filmmakers he studied in his spare time as a devout cinephile who subsequently enamoured him with the silver screen. Every filmmaker has a director or two who shaped them into the artist they’d become, and for Scorsese, it was a directing duo that changed everything for him.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger began their filmmaking careers separately, but it wasn’t until they began their directing partnership that everything took off for them, their first collaboration coming in 1939 with The Spy in Black. For Scorsese, though, it was 1948’s The Red Shoes that had the most profound effect on him when he was just a kid.
“The first time I recall seeing the Archers’ logo in colour was when my father took me to see The Red Shoes at the Academy of Music on 14th St. I was mesmerised… What I was really drawn to was the mystery of the red shoes, the hysteria of the picture, the extreme close-ups of Moira Shearer’s eyes as she feels herself being borne to her death by the shoes, or is it by herself? This was shocking for me,” he once revealed (via Sight and Sound).
All these years later, Scorsese still considers The Red Shoes one of the most beautiful and important movies ever made. According to his long-time editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who actually went on to marry Powell after meeting him through the Taxi Driver director, “Scorsese says The Red Shoes is in his DNA. He thinks about it almost every day”.
Scorsese has been fascinated with Powell and Pressburger ever since his father took him to watch their ballet-themed masterpiece, and soon he would come to appreciate everything else they made, from Black Narcissus and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to The Tales of Hoffman.
“They were the only independent filmmakers who managed to work within the system and still get away with making truly experimental films,” Scorsese claimed. Often retreating into worlds where it seems like magic really exists, even when the narrative appears more rooted in the realism of everyday life, Powell and Pressburger long crafted worlds that, above anything, were totally immersive. Just look at that dance sequence in The Red Shoes; it’s one of the most mesmerising things you’ll ever see.
Scorsese would create the documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger in 2024, deep diving into his love for the duo and their impact on cinema. It’s pretty clear that if any director (or in this case, directors) has had a definitive influence on Scorsese more than anyone else, it would be the Archers.
