Scorsese on the trailblazing films that shaped Hollywood

Hollywood director Martin Scorsese has shared some of his favourite Hollywood movies and their pioneering filmmakers.

Scorsese explores the evolution of American film and delves into the tension between personal artistic expression and the constraints of the Hollywood studio system in a British Film Institute documentary.

In Part 2 of A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, he emphasises how filmmakers pushed boundaries within these traditions.

Scorsese reflects on directors such as DW Griffith, Frederick Murnau and Cecil B DeMille, underscoring the enduring impact of these films on his own cinematic vision and filmmaking at large.

The Cameraman (1928)
“As King Vidor said, the cinema is the greatest means of expression ever invented,” said Scorsese. “But it is an illusion more powerful than any other and it should therefore be in the hands and the magicians and the wizards who can bring it to life.

“Here Buster Keaton, an aspiring cameraman, is showing his footage to MGM executives in the hope of getting a job. Unfortunately he has double exposed the film and the screening is a disaster. However as every director will experience, accidents can be the source of extraordinary poetry and beauty. What Keaton’s Cameraman needs is to learn and master the language of film.”

The Birth of a Nation (1915)
“The American film probably came of age in February 1915 when DW Griffith opened his first feature-length epic The Birth of a Nation. Griffith had developed two years before The Birth of a Nation the technique of cross-cutting.

“He shows you two events happening at the same time and intercuts them to increase the tension of the suspense. Now at that time, Griffith had to fight his distributors who feared that audiences would be confused by this innovation. It was in the great epics of the silent era that the illusionists learned to use special effects and visual wizardry to conjure up some of their most compelling visions.”

Intolerance (1916)
“Griffith’s passion for history was balanced by his passion for simple people – the victims of history. In modern-day America, a young woman is deemed an unfit mother because her husband is in jail.

“Oppression is represented by society matrons, Puritan reformers who want to place her baby in an orphanage. Griffith’s distressed heroines carry with them the heart and soul of the picture. For them, he composed his most eloquent close-ups.”

The Ten Commandments (1923)
“Like Griffith, Cecil B DeMille liked to paint on a big canvas. His ambition was to tell an absorbing personal story against a background of great historical events.

“He spent much more time working on dramatic construction than on planning photographic effects. The audience, he said, is interested in individuals whom they can love or hate. DeMille believed that he could translate the words of the Bible in the medium of film, literally.”

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
“In the late 20s, the most exciting experiments were taking place at the Fox Studios where the German master Frederick Murnau was given carte blanche on the strength of his European triumphs. His film Sunrise became the most expensive art film made in Hollywood.

“Rather than a plot, Murnau offered visions – the landscape of the mind. His ambition was to paint his characters’ desires with lights and shadows. This is how the frenzied city girl tempts the young farmer with the kaleidoscope of images. She wants him to leave everything behind, his land, his wife, his child, the peace and innocence of the country life. The vamp has planted a deadly thought in the young husband’s mind.”

7th Heaven (1927)
“[Frank] Borzage was not a highly educated man, let alone an art historian like Murnau. His approach to the medium was more instinctive. He was a maestro of the pantomime, what inspired him was the sheer power of emotions – this was the great mystery that elevated his melodramas into pure songs of love.

“Directed by Borzage, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell formed a unique couple at once vibrant with sexual passion and wrapped in a mystical aura. Their romance would lift them from the physical to the spiritual. War rips them apart, but as Borzage once stated, souls are made great through love and adversity.”

Scarlet Street (1945)
“To [certain directors], crime was a source of fascination. It allowed them to probe the nature of evil. Monstrosity was something banal, almost natural. The criminal world cannot be conveniently isolated or circumscribed in the urban underworld as in the old gangster film.

“It was everywhere lurking under the surface. Every man was a potential criminal. The common man falling into a trap as he succumbs first to vice and then to murder. This was Fritz Lang’s favourite plot – reality turning into a nightmare.”

Detour (1945)
“The phrase ‘film noir’ was coined by the French in 1946 when they discovered the Hollywood productions they had missed during the German occupation. This was not a specific genre like the gangster film but a mood which was best described by this line from [Edgar] Ulmer’s Detour: whichever way you turn, fate sticks out its foot to trip you.

“Detour was shot in six days for only $20,000. The director could only rely on his resourcefulness. In fact, his idiosyncratic style grew out of such drastic limitations. This is why Ulmer becomes such an inspiration over the years to low-budget filmmakers. Ulmer couldn’t even afford any special effects, he simply let the shot go in and out of focus repeatedly – an appropriate reflection of the character’s disoriented mental state.”

In Part 3, Scorsese discusses the renegade filmmakers who attack conventions head on and defy the system in order to expand the art form.

Broken Blossoms (1919)
“Back in the silent era, a few filmmakers challenged the idea of glamour and wholesomeness by injecting a dose of reality into their films,” he said. “DW Griffith, for instance, is often identified with quaint romanticism and Victorian sensibility. But more than once, he went beyond the accepted melodrama of his time.

“In Broken Blossoms, he showed how a sordid reality can destroy the purist dreams. This was the most delicate interracial romance. Physical and emotional suffering is what reunites Lilian Gish – the waif battered by her boxing father – and Richard Barthelmess – the young Buddhist who lost his religious fervour in the slums of London. Their bodies, like their souls, are bent or stunted. Both are broken blossoms.”

The Wedding March (1928)
“Erich von Stroheim was the most outrageous of the iconoclasts, and he fell the hardest. The Wedding March is a fairy tale, but a tragic one… The setting was Vienna in the last days of the Hapsburg dynasty, a decadent world that both fascinated and repelled Stroheim.

“Rather than indulge in the splendours of imperial Vienna, he exposed its moral squalor. The young prince’s father, a ruined aristocrat, strikes a deal with a rich merchant, who’s desperate to marry off his crippled daughter. Stroheim paid a high price for his transgressions… and his perceived intransigence. The very qualities that made him a great artist undid him. He was dubbed a megalomaniac and ended up losing control over most of his projects.”

The Man With the Golden Arm (1955)
“One of [Otto] Preminger’s most important victories was scored when he made the film The Man With the Golden Arm. It’s probably the first honest depiction of drug addiction on American screens. Frank Sinatra, in one of his most memorable performances, is a heroin addict going through withdrawal.”