“Film is a disease,” Frank Capra
said, “when infected your blood streams it takes over as number one hormone.”
This is collector’s piece either
you’re interested in American history of cinema or simply love to watch those
popular and lesser known golden classics of last century. Made for British Film
Institute (BFI), the volume is consists of three parts with more than three and
half hours material and it was brought to screen by none other than Martin
Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson. Scorsese who making his active presence felt
regularly by making topnotch motion pictures ever since 70s and 80’s powerful
New Hollywood cinema also has been making brilliant documentaries about
American cinema and music. No wonder many of the films he mentioned here
remained his inspirational material as he grew up in 40s and 50s as matinee obsessed
boy.
It’s constant dilemma for a Hollywood director to have a tug of war between his
personal expressions and commercial imperatives. From iconoclastic names of
film grammar like D W Griffith and Munrau to legends like John Ford, Hitchcock,
Orson Welles. Elia Kazan, and Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and lesser known
like King Vidor, Samuel Fuller, Nicholas ray, Anthony Mann, Arthur Penn, Raoul Walsh
and John Cassavates. Marty talks about the films that impressed him and moved
him and intrigued him as a cinephile and brought an urge to direction.
Sometimes even lesser known directors’ films remain more inspirational one than
the prestigious and popular ones. One can see interesting footages of many silent
classics to talkies ranging from various genres like noirs, westerns, gangster
films, epics and musicals- i.e. ‘Duel in the Sun’, ‘The Naked Kiss’, ‘The
Searchers’, ‘Scarface’, ‘Intolerance’, ‘Sunrise’, ‘Murder by Contract’, ‘The
Red House’, ‘The Phenix City Story’, ‘The Bad and The Beautiful’, ‘Colorado
Territory’, ‘On the Waterfront’ and many more including those impressive low
budget B movies like ‘Detour’ (shot in just 6 days!) and ‘Cat People’.
He segmented all of the directors
and their films in parts such as ‘The Director as story teller’, ‘The Director
as illusionist’, ‘The Director as smuggler’, ‘The Director as iconoclast’. He
extensively talks about filmmakers from silent era to almost early 70s
excluding the era of his career and fellow contemporaries. How filmmakers over
the period of time emerge as independent filmmakers, how from fiction and
narrative techniques they start exploring and documenting reality, how they
break free from studio foundations and set conventions; well Marty shows us
certain pioneers of that too. As it ends, I found many great filmmakers
sidelined with mere mentioning but as Marty mentioned there are numbers of
documentaries books and other materials available on them and so he has
highlighted those quite relegated geniuses.
Ratings-8/10
No comments:
Post a Comment