The movie Martin Scorsese simply referred to as “the beginning”
Martin Scorsese is undoubtedly the world’s most famous cinephile. In addition to being what many consider to be the greatest film director, he has always proselytised his deep connection to cinema of all kinds, stretching right back to childhood. In 1999, the Italian-American icon shared his love of Italian cinema in the documentary My Voyage to Italy. It included a section about a film so influential on him that he dubbed it “the beginning”.
In 2014, the Goodfellas helmer spoke to Criterion about his top ten films, which included a smorgasbord of fascinating pictures from all over the cinematic world. For example, he waxed lyrical about The River, a 1951 coming-of-age story from director Jean Renoir.
In response to World War II, a devastating conflict that killed millions and dealt a terrible blow to people’s faith in their own basic humanity, filmmakers had fertile ground to explore in their work. Scorsese explained: “The years right after the war were a very special time in cinema all around the world.” He feels that the best directors – including Renoir – were able to “create meditations on existence, on the miracle of life itself”.
Other classics that Scorsese fans might not have been aware of but could now seek out thanks to his recommendation were Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura. Then there was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, a British drama from 1948 which told the story of a ballerina torn between working to further her career in the demanding Ballet Lermontov and embracing a burgeoning romance with its composer. It’s a picture Scorsese rewatches often, and he admitted: “Every time I go back to look at it – about once a year – it’s new: it reveals another side, another level, and it goes deeper.”
However, Scorsese believes the picture that kickstarted his lifelong love affair with cinema was Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan, a neorealist World War II drama released the year after the conflict ended.
Scorsese revealed: “In My Voyage to Italy, the documentary that we made about Italian cinema, we started with this picture. For me, it really was the beginning. I saw it for the first time on television with my grandparents, and their overwhelming reaction to what had happened to their homeland since they left at the turn of the century was just as present and vivid for me as the images and the characters.”
For the young Scorsese, who was just beginning to comprehend the possibilities of cinema as a medium, Paisan unlocked something in his brain. He became cognizant of how filmmakers didn’t need fancy equipment or ideal conditions to make a picture; instead, these limitations and trying circumstances could actually lead to better, more immersive films. It made him realise that “cinema wasn’t just about the movie itself but the relationship between the movie and its audience.”
In truth, Scorsese saw Rossellini mashing together reality and fiction in a way rarely attempted at that time. You see, Paisan’s cast included professional and non-professional actors alike, and it was shot in areas of Italy still recovering from the horrors of war. In fact, it often seemed as if Rossellini simply turned his camera on what was in front of him at any given moment and captured a harrowing truth that couldn’t otherwise be manufactured.
The last of the picture’s six episodes – telling the deeply upsetting story of a group of partisans being executed in the Po River Valley – was particularly shocking. Scorsese marvelled: “Fellini said that when Rossellini was filming the Po Valley sequence, he acted on pure instinct, inventing freely as he went along.” To the budding director, it was “like seeing reality itself unfolding before your eyes.”
