History of the United States through the eyes of Martin Scorsese

Movies touch our hearts and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things. They take us to other places, they open doors and minds. Movies are the memories of our life time, we need to keep them alive.

- Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese was born in 1942 in Queens, New York in a traditional Sicilian family. He has been in the world of cinema really early in his life given that his two parents were actors. Being asthmatic, he hasn’t been able to practice any sports, so instead of this, his parents were taking him to the cinema very often. He fell in love with the cinema of John Ford, Hitchcock or Orson Welles. Later he decided to go to art university to study cinema. His first success was Mean Streets in 1973 which was also the occasion for him to meet Robert DeNiro. In 1976, he win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film festival with one of his masterpiece, Taxi Driver. After this his carrier is launched.

Martin Scorsese is well known for movies like Casino, Goodfellas or Mean Streets because it’s a really particular type of movie that he is the only one to master, but he also made different films like The Wolf of Wall Street or Shutter Island, which are not in this Italian New York style like as usual. Being asthmatic, he wasn’t really sociable during his childhood and that is also a character trait that we can feel in his movies, just like in Taxi Driver. We can easily notice that Scorsese likes to cast specials actors. He uses a range of actors that appears in most of his movies. The two principals ones are of course Robert DeNiro, who played in nine movies directed by Martin Scorsese, Leonardo Dicaprio, who played in five of his movies, and also Harvey Keitel. He is also encouraging his actors to stand out from the text to create moments of improvisation which became classic scenes from contemporary cinema. The famous DeNiro’s “You talkin’ to me?” in front of his mirror in Taxi Driver or Joe Pesci challenging Ray Liotta in Goodfellas are ones of the best examples. So as we said Martin Scorsese is known for movies about Italian people living in New York. But it’s more generally about immigrants in the United States, Irishmen, Jewish and of course Italians. His more popular films are often about Italian mobs, gangs or thugs. Scorsese’s movies are following history of European immigrants in the United States. Starting with Gangs of New York showing the fights between Americans and Irish immigrants during 19th century. Casino, explaining how Eastern Italian mafia took control of Las Vegas. Or even The Irishman about the strong link between Jimmy Hoffa and the Italian mafia. Scorsese is getting his inspiration from his childhood in the Queens. He is really accurate about these topics because he grew up in this kind of ambiance so he exactly know what he is talking about, that’s also why his films are so realistic. Martin wants his films to be really violent and sometimes even hard to watch, it shows the truth without filters. Martins Scorsese’s cinematography represent well the story of immigration in the United States and more specially the way it evolved in New York between the 50s and the 60s.

Joaquim Renaud