The two directors Martin Scorsese said “invented cinema”
Widely considered a master of cinema, Martin Scorsese is one of Hollywood’s most recognisable names, known for creating movies such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street.
The director emerged in the late 1960s after studying at the Tisch School of the Arts, making his first feature, Who’s That Knocking On My Door, in 1967. By the early 1970s, Scorsese was on his way to becoming one of the decade’s most critical cinematic voices, cementing his place with 1973’s Mean Streets.
The movie explored Catholicism, guilt, family and crime – themes that would come to define much of his future work. He found further acclaim with Taxi Driver, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. With Raging Bull, Scorsese racked up eight Academy Award nominations, winning two, including ‘Best Editing’ for Thelma Schoonmaker, a longtime collaborator of the director.
To become so successful, Scorsese studied his craft extensively, going back to the early days of cinema to understand how the medium has evolved. One of the earliest filmmakers in history, Georges Méliès, has proved to be a significant inspiration to Scorsese, so much so that he even made a film about him – Hugo. Scorsese also cites D.W. Griffith, who made the controversial movie The Birth of a Nation – which was responsible for repopularising the Klu Klux Klan – as a highly impactful figure.
“To put it plainly, these two men are among the people who invented cinema,” Scorsese explained. Discussing the impact of Méliès, who was a primary innovator of narrative cinema and special effects in the early 1900s, Scorsese stated that he “extended and deepened the experience of 19th-century theatre by using his camera as a magical device that caused people to disappear or shift from one side of a room to another or undergo astonishing metamorphoses, all rendered with split-second timing against lovingly rendered painted backdrops that often have the appearance of medieval manuscripts coming to life, particularly the hand-coloured films.”
Méliès helmed 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, one of the most influential movies of all time, as well as the first science-fiction movie. He was also responsible for making the world’s first horror film, Le Manoir du Diable, released as far back as 1896.
While the content of much of Griffith’s work has been criticised for being incredibly racist, some people, like Scorsese, still praise his pioneering approach to filmmaking. Scorsese heralded some of the techniques made popular by the director. He said, “Griffith employed focal distance, composition in space, acting tuned to the extreme sensitivity of the camera, movement within the frame and the technique of cross-cutting, among so many other discoveries and innovations, and laid the groundwork for cinema as the art form of the new century in the process.”
He added, “I feel very humble when I look at these films, and exhilarated. They influenced all of us for all time, and they remind us, those who have made a life in movies, of where we came from and where we’re going.”
