1 Introduction: Martin Scorsese, Authorship, Context
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Notes 1 Introduction: Martin Scorsese, Authorship, Context 1. Scorsese’s comment was made in an edition of Cinemax’s 1993 television series, Favorite Films. Astruc outlines his concept of the caméra-stylo thus: ‘the cinema is quite simply becoming … a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. This is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra-stylo (camera-pen)’ (1948: 17–18). 2. See Barthes (1968). 3. See, for example, Medhurst (1991), Powell (1994) and Holmlund (1996). 4. See, on one hand, Livingston (1997) and Gaut (1997) and, on the other, Maher (1998). 5. The following account of auteurism and the debates surrounding film authorship broadly parallels those offered, with contrasting emphases, by Lapsley and Westlake (1988: 105–28), Stoddart (1995) and Crofts (1998). Like so much recent work on authorship, this orthodoxy finds its provenance in Caughie (1981a). 6. While auteurism is afforded a convenient starting-date by François Truffaut’s polemical article, ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma français’ (Truffaut 1954), auteurism hardly occurred in a vacuum. Apart from the influence of Astruc, auteurist analyses avant la lettre are apparent, for example, in the predecessor of Cahiers, La Revue du cinéma, and in Lindsay Anderson’s writing for the British magazine Sequence. However, la politique des auteurs took the issue of authorship further than any previous formulation. 7. See, for example, Althusser (1964). 8. For a critique of the theoretical limitations of auteur-structuralism, see Henderson (1973). 9. See Crofts (1998: 319–22). 10. In a footnote to the translation of the Editors of Cahiers du cinéma’s ‘John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln’, the Screen editors relate the notion of inscription to Jacques Derrida: This usage of inscription (l’inscription) refers to work done by Jacques Derrida on the concept of écriture in Theories d’ensemble (Collection Tel Quel, 1968)… . Cahiers’ point here is that all individual texts are part of and inscribe themselves into one historically determined ‘text’ (l’histoire textuelle) within which they are produced; a reading of the individual text therefore requires examining both in its dynamic relationship with this general text and the relationship between the general text and specific historical events (1970: 44). Without wishing to appear too instumentalist, when considering author- ship a parallel is offered between Derrida’s ‘individual’ and ‘general’ texts 198 Notes 199 and the single ‘authored’ film and the ‘general text’ of his or her oeuvre, that, no less than Derrida’s ‘general text’, has a ‘dynamic relationship’ with its historical context. 2 New York, NYU, and the European Influence: What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?; It’s Not Just You, Murray!; The Big Shave 1. An amusing account of one of these attempts, Vesuvius VII, is given by childhood friend Dominic Lo Faro in Kelly (1980: 38–9). 2. Scorsese: ‘I never went to the Village until I enrolled at New York University in 1960…. From 1950 to 1960, for ten years, I never ventured past Broadway and Houston Street. I remember a friend of mine – I was about nine years old – his mother took us to the Village to see the little houses and flowers. It was like a wonderland. It was a very different culture’ (DeCurtis 1990: 64). 3. According to Michel Ciment, the Left Bank group, that included Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Chris Marker, was thus termed ‘because their approach was more intellectual and sophisticated, but also because their politics were definitely left-wing’ (1984: 39). 4. Following common practice, films throughout this study are dated according to their release. In terms of production, Le Beau Serge was shot December 1957–February 1958, Les Quatre Cent Coups November 1958–January 1959 and A bout de souffle August–September 1959. Where there is an accepted English version of a non-English film title, it is given in the Filmography. 5. The term nouvelle vague, moreover, ‘was coined by the journalist Françoise Giraud, who was conscious of the birth of “youth culture” at the end of the 1950s and who wrote a series of portraits of young people and their aspirations for the magazine L’Express’ (Forbes 1998: 463). Not that all the filmmakers who directed their first features were young. The emergence of the nouvelle vague similarly ‘opened the door to older directors, professionally trained, famous for their short films… . Georges Franju and Alain Resnais were thus able to direct their first features’ (Ciment 1984: 39). 6. Although the NYU film school may, in the early sixties, have encouraged ‘personal’ filmmaking, it hardly followed auteurism’s critical emphasis on Hollywood, upholding instead the then largely pro-art cinema orthodoxy. Scorsese notes: ‘Movie magazine appeared from Britain with its list of great directors, and there were Hawks and Hitchcock at the top. The professors were totally against these critical views’ (Thompson and Christie 1996: 18). 7. In 1962, Scorsese co-directed and photographed a short with fellow student Robert Siegel. Titled Inesita, the film represents a flamenco dancer. Manoogian dismisses it thus: ‘It was very, very traditional in terms of its camera work and very ordinary, and what they had done primarily was to present Inesita as the dancer. She was very good. The film was just another one of those films’ (Kelly 1980: 60). 200 Notes 8. According to Allan Arkush, the situation at NYU had hardly improved by the late sixties: The higly respected ‘N.Y.U. Film School’ consisted of four small rooms on the eighth floor of a building a block and a half from Washington Square Park. We had four movieolas that ate student films at an alarming rate and only one camera capable of sound… . Haig Manoogian coped as best as he could but all he could offer was enthusiasm and a Bell & Howell Filmo. The Filmos were virtually indestructable cast-iron cameras that had to be wound up with a door knob because all the keys had disappeared years ago (1983: 57). 9. See Kelly (1980: 12). 10. Godard’s oft-quoted maxim is, ‘cinema is not the reflection of reality, but the reality of that reflection’. See, for example, MacCabe (1980: 110). 11. The tension between the documentary and the reflexive extends to Scorsese’s documentaries Italianamerican (1974), The Last Waltz (1978) and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978). Reflecting the opening sequence of It’s Not Just You, Murray!, the films contain numerous elements that problematize documentary ‘objectivity’ by reflexively foregrounding their constructedness and, further, Scorsese’s ‘subjective’ control of the pro- jects: the crew are seen and/or heard; interviews are ‘revealingly’ stopped and restarted; Scorsese sets up interviews, prompts subjects from a script, directs the camera and so on. 12. Mary Pat Kelly makes a similar point: ‘As Murray drives … he holds up the picture… . There is little Joe. But then the photograph moves. The little boy goes running down the walk in the jerky, all-at-once style of the early film. Appropriately, Joe’s beginning steps are linked with the start of the movies’ (1980: 155). 13. See Ciment and Henry (1975: 9). 3 Entering the Marketplace, Developing a Style: Who’s That Knocking at My Door? 1. In discussing his use of mirrors, Scorsese (unsurprisingly) offers a biographical rather than a Lacanian/psychoanalytic provenance. It is, however, a bio- graphical reference that suggestively evokes a desired identification with and internalization of a succession of ego ideals: ‘My training in handling actors came from watching a lot of movies and being thrilled by them. That’s how a lot of mirror scenes in my movies came about. I used to fantasize in front of the mirror, playing all my heroes’ (Thompson and Christie 1996: 42). 2. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, this sexual inequality is related to the role of the phallus as ‘the privileged signifier in the child’s entry into the Symbolic’ (Johnston 1976: 321). Given the ‘phallocentrism of patriarchal culture is founded on the paradigm of male sexuality – the penis’ (ibid. : 322), the female suffers ‘negative entry into the Symbolic’ and a consequent secondary cultural definition ‘as that which is not male’ (ibid.: 321, 322). 3. Scorsese: ‘J.R., c’était moi!’ (Ciment and Henry 1975: 10). Notes 201 4. Films made by Engel, Rogosin and Clarke include Lovers and Lollipops (Engel, 1955), On the Bowery (Rogosin, 1956), Come Back Africa (Rogosin, 1959), The Connection (Clarke, 1961) and The Cool World (Clarke, 1963). 5. Although shot in 16 mm, Shadows was blown up into 35mm for commer- cial distribution and exhibition. 6. Acknowledging this, the credit sequence of Shadows includes the title, ‘Presented By Jean Shepherd’s Night People’. Cassavetes’s ‘use’ of Edge of the City to finance Shadows looks forward to the way in which in future he was to use the money that he earned as an actor to help to finance the films that he made as a director. 7. Cassavetes amended the original version of Shadows, which premiered in late 1958, because he thought it too stylized. Abandoning over half the footage of the original version, Cassavetes shot eight new scenes, and, after three months of re-editing, premiered the extant version of Shadows on 11 November 1959. For a more detailed discussion of Cassavetes’s film- making style, see Margulies (1998). 8. For further consideration of the relation of Comolli’s position on direct cinema to Cassavetes’s filmmaking, see Kouvaros (1998: 253–6).