Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese: The Confessional Relocated

He meant to be a priest. A small, sickly boy in a Sicilian-American household, kept out of the street by illness, Martin Scorsese spent his childhood in the dark of Manhattan movie houses instead — and seriously considered entering the priesthood before he chose film. Britannica now describes him as "perhaps the most significant American director of the late 20th and early 21st centuries." He never really abandoned the confessional. He relocated it.

Little Italy

Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese was born on 17 November 1942 in Queens, New York, to Charles and Catherine Scorsese, both of Sicilian immigrant stock. The family moved to Little Italy in Manhattan, and that handful of blocks — its parish churches, its social clubs, its codes about loyalty and payment and who is owed what — became the raw material he would return to for six decades. Ill health made him an observer rather than a participant, and the compensating obsession was cinema. He absorbed classical Hollywood, and the films of John Ford in particular, with the completeness of someone who had nowhere else to be.

NYU and the Corman School

He took a bachelor's degree in English at New York University in 1963 and a master's in film there in 1966, arriving in the first generation of American directors who learned the medium in a classroom rather than a studio mailroom. His first feature, *Who's That Knocking at My Door* (1967), starred Harvey Keitel and was already recognisably his: Catholic guilt, young men in rooms, a camera that will not sit still.

The practical education came from Roger Corman, who financed *Boxcar Bertha* (1972) on a low budget and expected an exploitation picture in return. Scorsese delivered one, learned how to shoot fast, and immediately spent that credibility on something else entirely.

Mean Streets

*Mean Streets* (1973) is the film in which the style arrives whole. It brought Robert De Niro into a partnership that would run across decades, and it established the grammar Scorsese has been refining ever since: restless, subjective camerawork; editing that cuts against the rhythm of the scene rather than with it; and pop music used not as decoration but as narrative argument, telling you what a character believes about himself while the images tell you the truth. Violence in his films is not spectacle but diagnosis — a way of finding out what a man is.

Taxi Driver and Raging Bull

*Taxi Driver* (1976) welded De Niro to the screenwriter Paul Schrader, another lapsed-religious sensibility, and produced a portrait of urban loneliness curdling into righteous violence that has never lost its capacity to disturb. Four years later came *Raging Bull* (1980), the Jake LaMotta film, widely regarded as his most fully realised work: a boxing picture shot in black and white about a man who can only understand love as damage, and who is punished in the ring for sins committed outside it.

The 1980s were harder. *The Last Temptation of Christ* (1988), his third collaboration with Schrader, made explicit the theology that had been implicit since Little Italy and drew furious religious protest for its depiction of a Christ tempted by ordinary human life.

The Comeback and the Late Style

*Goodfellas* (1990) was the critical return to form, and it did something structurally new with the gangster picture: it treated organised crime as a workplace, seductive and then squalid, narrated by a man too limited to grasp his own story. From there Scorsese built a late career of unusual range and stamina. *The Departed* (2006) finally won him the Academy Award for directing, presented in 2007, after decades in which the Academy had honoured almost everyone around him instead. *The Irishman* (2019), made for Netflix, reunited De Niro with Al Pacino for a valedictory account of loyalty and its costs. *Killers of the Flower Moon* (2023), about the murders of Osage people for their oil wealth, drew ten Oscar nominations.

The other honours accumulated: the Kennedy Center Honors in 2007, a Grammy in 2005, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2010, Emmy Awards in 2011 and 2012.

The Archivist

In 1990 — the same year as *Goodfellas* — Scorsese founded The Film Foundation, and it may be the least glamorous and most consequential thing he has done. By 2010 the Foundation had restored 545 films. Its remit is deliberately unfashionable: not only studio classics but avant-garde work, silents, documentaries, newsreels and home movies. Scorsese has argued for saving the experimental films "that are deeply compelling and can change the way you look at cinema" and the silent footage of "everyday events" that "remind us how life has — and hasn't — changed in over 100 years." The Foundation absorbed the Artists Rights Foundation, taking on the fight against colourisation and unauthorised re-editing, and its World Cinema Project extends the same work to films from countries with no preservation infrastructure of their own.

Why Martin Is Called a Genius

The case rests on a specific and unusual combination: a filmmaker who is simultaneously a formal innovator and a scholar of the form he is innovating. Most directors have a style; Scorsese has a working knowledge of the entire history of cinema and deploys it as a vocabulary, quoting, inverting and arguing with Ford, the Italian neorealists and the studio melodrama inside films that are otherwise about Catholic guilt and American violence. The technical achievement is real and identifiable — the subjective camera, the editing that produces anxiety rather than clarity, the use of a pop song as a character's self-deception — and it has been imitated so thoroughly that it now reads as the default language of the American crime film. Britannica's judgment, that he is "perhaps the most significant American director" of his era, is a claim about influence as much as quality, and on influence the evidence is overwhelming.

The counter-case deserves stating plainly. His genius is not conceptual or intellectual in the way a novelist's or a scientist's might be; it is the genius of execution and of taste, of knowing precisely where to put the camera and when to cut. His range is narrower than the reverence suggests — the great films return repeatedly to guilt-ridden men, and women are frequently the least realised presences in them. And he has been accused, not always unfairly, of making violence and criminality more seductive than his moral framework can contain. He is a supreme craftsman with a theological obsession, which is not quite the same as a philosopher. The films are the argument, and they are strong enough not to need inflation.

Legacy

Scorsese has been married five times and has lived in New York City throughout; he has three daughters, including Francesca, who works in the industry. Now in his eighties, he occupies an odd double position: the last surviving major figure of the New Hollywood generation still making large films, and the movement's chief archivist, spending his authority on restoring other people's work. The body of films from *Mean Streets* to *Killers of the Flower Moon* is the obvious monument. The 545 rescued negatives may prove to be the more generous one.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Director — 2007
• Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award — 2010
• Notable work: Taxi Driver
• Notable work: Goodfellas
• Notable work: Casino
• Notable work: Gangs of New York
• Worked as film director, film actor and film producer