The movies Martin Scorsese calls “more than cinema”
Few directors have been as outspoken as Martin Scorsese has when it comes to preserving the art and heart of cinema. Between his criticism of the ever-increasing dominance of superhero blockbusters and his efforts to preserve and restore classic cinema, the beloved filmmaker has had an unparalleled impact on the art form.
Accordingly, his own films are always masterfully creative and inspired by his own life and love for his craft. One of Scorsese’s biggest influences, which can be felt throughout his filmography, is his Italian-American upbringing. From the Italian-American protagonist in his 1967 feature debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, to his 1974 documentary Italianamerican which charts his family’s experience of immigrating to New York, Scorsese’s identity has always found its way into his art.
When he was growing up, Scorsese found himself gravitating towards those films as an audience member, relishing in the opportunity to see himself and his family reflected on screen. In an interview with GQ, he recalled: “I was five years old in New York, it was the late ‘40s, we had a television, 16 inch. On Friday nights there was an Italian film shown for the Italian-American community.”
For the showing, Scorsese’s mother, father, uncles, and grandparents, the latter of whom only spoke Sicilian, would come together around the television screen. One film Scorsese recalls having a particularly potent impact on him was Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist drama, Bicycle Thieves, or The Bicycle Thief.
The Goodfellas director found that those films mirrored the lives of those around him, and suddenly, they became more than just movies. He said: “They had these words on the bottom, the people that were speaking in the film, they were speaking the same way as my family. Those Italian films were more than cinema, they were a form of truth that I related to because it somehow had something to do with who I am.”
The young director was affected by this experience far more deeply than admiring the technicalities of the shoot or the acting; he felt seen. As a result, those films have impacted his own filmmaking, not technically, but in his devotion to affecting that same feeling through cinema: “And so no matter what I shoot, it isn’t directly saying, oh look, we’re gonna do a shot now from The Bicycle Thief. No, it’s the emotional and psychological impact of experiencing that film when I was five or six in the room with these people who lived it.”
Scorsese’s own films have certainly achieved the same feat, going far beyond even technical feats to affect emotion in his viewers and put a form of truth onto screen. His love of film and his passion to portray real-life experiences on screen shine through in each new project he helms.
