Martin Scorsese (b. 1942)
An asthmatic Catholic kid from Little Italy who turned guilt into a camera style.
What He Was Doing
Scorsese grew up in a neighborhood where the church and the mob sat on the same block, and his films have never really left that corner. His protagonists are sinners who know they’re sinners and keep sinning anyway — Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Henry Hill, Frank Sheeran, Jesuit missionaries in Japan. They all want redemption, none of them earn it cleanly, and the camera won’t let them off the hook.
Stylistically he’s the opposite of Kubrick: hot where Kubrick is cold, tracking shots that feel like someone sprinting through a room, needle drops that act as moral commentary, voiceover that lies to itself in real time. He’s also film history’s loudest champion — the guy who restored prints of Powell and Pressburger and Satyajit Ray on the side.
Key Films
- Taxi Driver (1976) — the Underground Man behind a Manhattan windshield.
- Raging Bull (1980) — a middleweight boxer who can only feel through violence.
- Goodfellas (1990) — the mob as American Dream, narrated by its dumbest participant.
- The Departed (2006) — two moles, one Boston, infinite Catholic shame.
- Silence (2016) — Jesuits in 17th-century Japan, and the God who does not speak.
Why He Matters
Scorsese is the argument that American cinema can be as morally serious as Dostoevsky. He imported the Russian novel’s conscience into post-industrial New York. Every American filmmaker who thinks genre is a vehicle for ethics — Tarantino, PTA, Safdie brothers, Barry Jenkins — is working in his shadow.
Connections
- New Hollywood — one of the founders; along with Coppola, the movement’s beating heart.
- Dostoevsky — Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is the Underground Man; Notes from Underground was the screenplay’s explicit inspiration. Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov also haunts every Scorsese killer.
- Gogol — the small man swelling with grievance; the absurdity of low-level urban life. Bickle shares DNA with Akaky Akakievich.
- Kubrick — the opposite pole of the same New Hollywood moment.
- Hitchcock — Scorsese’s textbook; voyeurism in Taxi Driver is Rear Window on amphetamines.
- Catholic theology — guilt, confession, the impossibility of grace; Silence reads like a Kierkegaardian dispute.
Lineage
Predecessors: Hitchcock, John Cassavetes, Powell & Pressburger, Italian neorealism, Dostoevsky, the Catholic confession.
Successors: Paul Thomas Anderson, the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny; David O. Russell; every New York indie that uses a needle drop as moral cue.