A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies
An academically trained filmmaker (NYU film school) who is among today's most innovative directors, Scorsese presents an engrossing, idiosyncratic memoir of his experiences with motion pictures, including recollections of his first boyhood journeys to movie theaters and the impressions the films made on him. In analyzing American film since the silent era, he especially highlights Westerns, musicals, and gangster movies, genres that originated in America. As a freewheeling director who has shunned Hollywood, Scorsese is intrigued by maverick directors like Erich von Stroheim, who brought about their own downfall by bucking the system, as well as by the more effective iconoclasts who were able to produce great films while playing by the studios' rules. Though this volume is essentially the script of the successful 1995 TV series of the same name commissioned by the British Film Institute and later rebroadcast on PBS, and while the cinematic illustrations portrayed on the screen are obviously lost in book format, there is much here for the serious film student to consider. Recommended for academic libraries and cinema collections.?Richard Grefrath, Univ. of Nevada Lib., RenoCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.