Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
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., Reno
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
An engaging and lavishly illustrated look at American film, from the master director. Based on the scripts of two documentaries on American film by Scorsese and writer/director Wilson, this is less a history than a catalogue raisonn‚ of the films that have shaped Scorsese's own works. He is a notoriously devoted film buff, and his knowledge of cinema is both encyclopedic and deeply, even humbly, practical: ``The more pictures I make, the more I realize that I really don't know. I'm always looking for something or someone that I can learn from.'' One of the rewards of this book is the number of filmmakers, such as Boetticher and Ulmer, and films, such as Silver Lode, that Scorsese retrieves from obscurity--the filmography at the end is not to be missed. As a director, he is understandably a strong proponent of the auteur theory and its emphasis on films as personal expressions. In fact, this book is organized around various modes and manners of directing, from the ``Director as Storyteller'' to the ``Director as Smuggler'' to the ``Director as Illusionist.'' Scorsese and Wilson's discussion of the difference between directors who worked subversively within the system (smugglers such as Fritz Lang) and those who worked against the system (iconoclasts such as Orson Welles) is particularly revealing, as is their analysis of the three uniquely American genres: musicals, Westerns, and gangster films. However, in line with this work's coffee table aspirations, Scorsese and Wilson often tend to favor ``let's go to the highlights'' film appreciation over rigorous film criticism. This book also suffers from its screenplay origins--it doesn't read nearly as well as it plays--but it is a worthy albeit idiosyncratic window on American film and its shaping influence on a major director. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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