I didn’t go to film school — never even took a film class in college — but I’ve watched Martin Scorsese’s documentaries about movies again and again. I’ve done the homework, too. He’s the reason I first watched “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Roma, città aperta.” He’s the reason Todd Haynes’ six-headed approach to Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There” wasn’t much of a reach; it had already been suggested in Scorsese’s doc “No Direction Home.” He’s the reason I’ve got a good recipe for pasta sauce; it’s in the end credits of “ItalianAmerican.”
His documentaries let you love him. You love his artistry in “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” but they’re such dark films they make the filmmaker hard to love. But he shows up onscreen in “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies” and confesses that as a child he stole pictures out of a book from the New York Public Library, and you fall in love.
He’s everything you want in a teacher: He’s passionate, articulate and has a wellspring of knowledge about the subject like no one else. At the end of “Personal Journey” when he says “This is where we have to stop. We just don’t have the time to go any further,” you think, “What do you mean? I’ve got time. Where are you going? Don’t leave.”
A portrait of the artist as a self-creationIn a broad sense his feature films are about destruction, particularly self-destruction (see: Johnny Boy, Travis, Jake), while his documentaries are about creation, particularly artistic self-creation. How did Bobby Zimmerman become the many faces of Bob Dylan? How did this band become The Band and get onstage fronting, seemingly, the whole history of rock n’ roll?
Most of all, how did an asthmatic boy from Little Italy become Martin Scorsese? Part of the answer lies in “ItalianAmerican,” his short doc about his parents, Charles and Catherine, whom he interviewed in the living room and kitchen of their Elizabeth Street apartment on the lower east side in 1974.
Part of the answer lies in “Personal Journey,” which ignores the culturally correct movies (no “Gone with the Wind,” “Casablanca,” Clark Gable) for the films that made him who he is (“Duel in the Sun,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “Sweet Smell of Success”).
And part of the answer lies in “My Voyage to Italy,” in which Scorsese shows us a 16-inch RCA-Victor television set like his father bought in the late 1940s, and on which, Friday nights, his extended family used to watch the Italian movies locally broadcast to the large Italian-American community in New York. “I know that if I’d never seen the films that I’m going to be talking about here,” he says, “I’d be a very different person, and, of course, a very different filmmaker.”
Some will argue that you can’t parse destruction and creation; that for every second you’re destroying something, something else is being created. Scorsese, a former seminarian, who sees something cleansing in the bloody finales of his films, might make this argument.
Where it all comes fromStill, the medium is the message. With feature films, you’re given a character and the main question is, “Who is this guy and where is he going?” Scorsese’s answer is invariably a downward spiral. Documentaries, in contrast, are factual matters, and backward-looking. “Who are we and how did we get here?” They emphasize creation.
Scorsese emphasizes it, too. I’d argue that “No Direction Home” is one of the greatest paeans to the creative process put on film. How did such poetic words pour out of someone as young as Dylan? Liam Clancy calls him a shape-changer, while Dave von Ronk implies that Dylan somehow tapped into the American collective unconscious. Joan Baez, doing the best Dylan imitation ever, quotes him, shrugging, “I don’t know where the f--- it comes from.”
The modern Dylan simply says, “An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s ‘at’ somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming.” Which sets up the sad, final quarter of the doc, in which folkies condemn him for becoming something other than a folk singer and reporters ask him to label himself. They’re asking for a noun but they’re talking to a verb.
This isn’t far from Scorsese’s own thoughts. In a 1991 interview with Anthony DeCurtis in South Atlantic Quarterly, he said, “One of the breakthroughs is to know that you really don’t know that much.” On the creative process, he said, “I prefer the stuff that comes out of nowhere. But, you know, you’ve got to get them from out of nowhere. I don’t know where that comes from.”
Getting us onstageSure, there’s obviously destruction in “The Last Waltz,” Scorsese’s 1977 doc about The Band’s final concert at the appropriately named Winterland in San Francisco. But the film doesn’t record destruction. Great music is being made during it. It’s celebratory.
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Celebrity Sightings
Scorsese gets us onstage for it. And it’s his stage. His people designed it, lit it, and his cameramen — including cinematographers like Michael Chapman (“Raging Bull”), Laszlo Kovacs (“Easy Rider”) and Vilmos Zsigmond (“Close Encounters”) — filmed it. They let us see the musicians interacting, joking, looking with doubt as to where Dylan is taking them and a beat later realizing and joining and going.
“Shine a Light,” his new Rolling Stones documentary, continues this tradition. Scorsese wants his stage, his cameras, his lighting. The beginning of the film is a near-silent, transatlantic battle between two perfectionists — Scorsese and Jagger — with the director casting himself in the role of hapless comic relief.
But then his work gives us the life onstage: Guitars talking to each other, singers talking to each other, the expressions on haggard faces. You sense the camaraderie, and — most notably when Buddy Guy joins — the competition. If “The Last Waltz” was the story of a band leaving the road after 16 years, “Shine a Light” is the story of a band who never did.
In this sense the doc is less a paean to creation than it is to longevity and survival. It’s about how not to destroy yourself: Just keep doing what you love doing. That lesson is as true for the men in front of the camera as it is for the man behind it.
If Erik Lundegaard had any money at all he would bankroll a documentary called “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through World Cinema.” He can be reached at .