A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is a documentary film of 225 minutes in length, presented by Martin Scorsese and produced by the British Film Institute.

In the film Martin Scorsese examines a selection of his favorite American films grouped according to four different types of directors: the director as storyteller; the director as an illusionist: D.W. Griffith or F. W. Murnau, who created new editing techniques among other innovations that made the appearance of sound and color possible later on; the director as a smuggler— filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller, and Vincente Minnelli, who used to hide subversive messages in their films; and the director as an iconoclast, those filmmakers attacking social conventionalism — Charles Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Sam Peckinpah.

The documentary is structured in segments:


Part I
The director's dilemma
The director as storyteller
The Western
The Gangster film
The Musical
Part II
The director as illusionist
The director as smuggler I
Part III
The director as smuggler II
The director as iconoclast
It was originally shown in three parts on Channel 4 in the UK in 1995.

Synopsis

Martin Scorsese, célèbre réalisateur américain, énumère les films américains qui l'ont marqué et qui ont influencé son œuvre. Son voyage à travers le cinéma commence au début du siècle pour se terminer en 1969, date de son premier film : Who's That Knocking at My Door.

Actors