A Companion to Martin Scorsese
“This valuable book brings the exceptional scale of Martin Scorsese’s film work into clear view. His achievements are monumental, and the essays collected in this work provide wonderfully detailed and vivid analyses of his oeuvre. A comprehensive study of the most exciting filmmaker working today.”
Robert Burgoyne, University of St Andrews
A Companion to Martin Scorsese, Revised Edition is a comprehensive collection of original essays assessing the career of one of America’s most prominent contemporary filmmakers. The first reference work of its kind, this book contains contributions from influential scholars in North America and Europe. The essays use a variety of analytic approaches to study numerous aspects of Scorsese’s work, from his earliest films to his place within the history of American and world cinema. They consider his work in relation to auteur theory, the genres in which he has worked, his use of popular music, and his recent involvement with film preservation. Several of the essays offer fresh interpretations of some of Scorsese’s most influential films, including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, Gangs of New York, Hugo, and The Irishman. Others take a broader approach and discuss the representation of violence, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, race, and other themes across his work. With insights that will interest film scholars as well as movie enthusiasts, this is an important contribution to the scholarship of contemporary American cinema.
Table of Contents
Contributors ix
Introduction: Artistic Solutions to Sociological Problems 1
Aaron Baker
Part One The Pious Auteur 15
1 How Scorsese Became Scorsese: A Historiography of New Hollywood’s Most Prestigious Auteur 17
Marc Raymond
2 Smuggling Iconoclasm: European Cinema and Scorsese’s Male Antiheroes 38
Giorgio Bertellini and Jacqueline Reich
3 Italian Films, New York City Television, and the Work of Martin Scorsese 53
Laura E. Ruberto
4 The Imaginary Museum: Martin Scorsese’s Film History Documentaries 71
Robert P. Kolker
5 Images of Religion, Ritual, and the Sacred in Martin Scorsese’s Cinema 91
David Sterritt
Part Two Social Contexts and Conflicts 115
6 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Italianamerican: Gender, Ethnicity, and Imagination 117
Aaron Baker
7 Mobsters and Bluebloods: Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence in the Perspective of his Italian-American Films 133
Robert Casillo
8 Off-White Masculinity in Martin Scorsese’s Gangster Films 173
Larissa M. Ennis
9 Irish-American Identity in the Films of Martin Scorsese 195
Matt R. Lohr
10 Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Television Authorship in Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues and Boardwalk Empire 214
Jonathan J. Cavallero
11 Cinema According to Marty: Scorsese as American Film Culture’s Intellectual 237
Marc Raymond
Part Three Form and the Filmmaking Process 249
12 Martin Scorsese and the Music Documentary 251
Michael Brendan Baker
13 Martin Scorsese Rocks 271
Giuliana Muscio
14 Music as Cultural Signifier of Italian-American Life in Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Mean Streets 289
Anthony D. Cavaluzzi
15 When Marty Met Bobby: Collaborative Authorship in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver 304
R. Colin Tait
16 Scorsese’s Landscape of Mortality 324
Murray Pomerance
17 Borderlines: Boundaries and Transgression in the City Films of Martin Scorsese 343
Brendan Kredell
Part Four Major Films 365
18 Mean Streets as Cinema of Independence 367
Stefan Sereda
19 Taxi Driver and Veteran Trauma 385
Michael D. High
20 Filming the Fights: Subjectivity and Sensation in Raging Bull 408
Leger Grindon
21 The Last Temptation of Christ: Queering the Divine 432
Daniel S. Cutrara
22 The Cinematic Seduction of Not a “Good Fella” 454
Bambi Haggins
23 Hugo and the (Re-)Invention of Martin Scorsese 471
Guerric DeBona
24 The Irishman: Cosmopolitan Authorship in the Age of Streaming Media 492
Aaron Baker
Index 506
