Martin Scorsese Highlights New York on Film Over the Decades at New-York Historical Society
The Central Park West-located museum hosted "Le Conversazioni" with one of filmmaking history's maestros on May 7.
“Someday a real rain will come and wash this scum off the streets. I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, to Harlem. I don't care. Don't make no difference to me. It does to some. Some won't even take spooks. Don't make no difference to me.” (“Taxi Driver,” 1976)
New York culture has been reflected in films taking place in and about the city for over a hundred years. Sergio Leone, Elia Kazan, Francis Ford Coppola, Charlie Chaplin, Miloš Forman — each director has a different geographical background but all can authentically represent New York with their lenses. On May 7, another quintessential New York filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, discussed the city as shown on film at New-York Historical Society.
The Oscar-winning director of Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990) and, most recently, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), sat down with moderator Antonio Monda in front of a sold-out crowd that filled the museum’s Robert H. Smith Auditorium. The talk was a part of the “Le Conversazioni” series, which pairs notable filmmakers, writers and other artists with Monda, with the previous event in March featuring Scorsese collaborator Paul Schrader.
With clips from Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Big Heat (1953), Manhattan (1979), Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and dozens of other New York-set films dating from the silent era to the 21st century, Scorsese engaged with the films’ visualizations of New York. Whether they’re romanticizing the energy or showing a more brutal side of the city, above all, Scorsese explained, the films are realistic in one way or another.
“You’re a part of that land,” the 81-year-old director said. “You’re a part of that culture: the structure of the city, the sense of what concrete is like in the heat and in the cold, what a paved road is like as opposed to cobblestone. These are sensory memories, things that mean something and have actually contributed to who you are, for better or worse, or a balance of good and bad together.”
Noting the aforementioned directors Leone, Kazan, Chaplin and Forman’s respective home countries of Italy, Turkey, England and Czechoslovakia, Scorsese highlighted the value of immigrants’ cinematic perspectives.
“When you come from another place,” he said, “I think you see it in a completely different way, and people may say that’s a positive thing. There’s nothing wrong with it; you just see it differently. And there are elements that are somewhat fantastical [like the Brooklyn Bridge shot in Once Upon a Time in America].”
Continuing on the point of an outsider’s translated view of New York, Scorsese said, “When you come from someplace else, you see the environment you’ve chosen to interpret — very different from the people who live in it every day.”
As a child growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Scorsese’s asthma kept him away from certain activities, and watching movies was a special place he could go — both physically (at the theaters nearby) and mentally (in an imaginative realm). Speaking on the late-1940s and 1950s Hollywood films that he grew up on, Scorsese said, “They represented a type of fantasy in a way, but at the same time they had a kind of codified truth, telling me stories about people, about emotions, psychology, postwar America.” Attracted to the realism of films like Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), which was brought up several times throughout the evening, Scorsese said that the acting in the early decades of cinema was not “wrong,” it was just a different style of acting that “comes from a different place.”
The realism he witnessed on a screen did not only come from American films. Living in a Catholic environment among a family of Italian immigrants in Little Italy as a child, Scorsese’s living room became a center for his exposure to brutally honest and despairing Italian neorealist cinema, which his family found themselves relating to.
“To a certain extent, there was a humanity I saw in neorealist films like Paisan (1946), Rome, Open City (1945), and Bicycle Thieves (1948), for example, when I was five or six, on television, on a small screen,” he said. “There was a station in New York in 1948 or 1949 and for the few who had TVs, they would show, on Friday nights, films for the Italian-American community with subtitles. I saw the effect on the family around me. I had the Hollywood cinema and I had that — Hollywood cinema was codified but [neorealism] was no code. This was something else. It was closer to the life I was experiencing. There was a real truth there.”
In 1990, Scorsese and several other leading filmmakers founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation. In the 1960s, most silent films were in poor shape, and even today, almost 90 percent of all silent cinema from all over the world is gone. (Some films are run through projectors and then thrown away due to poor quality and “worthless” celluloid was sometimes burnt to get the silver out of the nitrate). Commenting on the value of silent cinema, Scorsese said, “It’s a different language. They’re communicating with you in a different way.” Now, with the help of restoration projects, “You can appreciate silent films nearly the same way they were meant to be seen, including the films’ tinting.”
Among underseen films Scorsese recommended were Beau James (1957) — if you want to get an idea of a controversial 1920s New York mayor who many still loved — and Blast of Silence (1961), a film Scorsese described as feeling “homemade,” partly because of its extremely low budget.
Scorsese and Monda also took time to look back on the director’s own work, with the audience being shown clips of the Copacabana tracking shot from Goodfellas — which Scorsese said took the cast and crew three-quarters of a day to shoot — and the “Diary of a Taxi Driver” scene from Taxi Driver, which — contrasted with the “scum” that Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle narrates about — features gorgeous visuals of rain and fluorescent lights on the city streets. Reflecting on Raging Bull, whose themes deeply resonated with Scorsese during filming, he said, “To make a picture, you really have to believe in it and be convinced that you want to be there… If you don’t want to be there, you shouldn’t be there.”
The Casino director’s next projects include a biopic about Frank Sinatra and an eight-episode series on Catholic saints.
To stay aware of future “Le Conversazioni” events, visit New-York Historical Society’s website and consider signing up for their newsletter.
5/8/24