Berlinale: Martin Scorsese: Dissecting the American Myth

Martin Scorsese, born in New York in 1942, grew up in a Sicilian world bubble. At that time, the director reports, entire emigrant villages from southern Italy lived together in a New York house. In the neighboring house, the neighboring village – but there was no contact between them. The grandparents didn’t speak a word of English, the parents ran small shops in the neighborhood, and only the children began to discover New York in their own way. As wandering little Italian-Americans, they were mistrusted – and only expected to do evil. This all-pervasive feeling of being an outsider still characterizes Scorsese’s films today.

For him, the cinema became a bridge between Italy and America. Back then, an Italian film in its original version was shown every Sunday afternoon. The whole extended family sat in front of the television, which they already had, and hung on the actors’ every word. That was home. But no longer tangible, just a shadow play of light and dark. But what transformative power! One of Scorsese’s most beautiful and personal films is the documentary “My Italian Journey” from 1999 about Italian cinema. A declaration of love to Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini or Luchino Visconti. This important director becomes a humble admirer. And then came American cinema. Scorsese made “A Journey Through American Film” about it, with the same dedication.

This trip shows how he became an American: through the Westerns. He saw them in the cinema, especially those by John Ford. What beauty of the struggle to the death, despite the depravity of the characters of most of the actors. This became a theme that he continued to vary in new ways, right up to the current mafia films. As a child of Catholic parents, which he remained despite all his rebellion against the forced subordination to the church, Scorsese still has images in his head of Madonnas on the one hand and whores on the other, always blonde, mysterious and unattainable for him as a dark-haired Sicilian. The women in his films appear almost trashily drawn. But towering over everything is the only female being that a Sicilian can love unconditionally, even in New York: his mother, who died in 1997.

This director remains a virtuoso of mixed emotions. The unease resonates in all of his films; What he inspires, he also alienates. Even in such enormous visual epics as “Gangs of New York,” which was shown at the Berlinale in 2003, everything remains a chamber piece: man as a dangerous black box. In this film he deals with an American founding myth: New York as the melting pot of the nation.

It is no coincidence that Scorsese’s films were considered “box office poison” in Hollywood until the 1980s. “The Last Temptation of Christ,” for example, could not be financed for a long time, but in 1988 the film was made with a mini-budget of seven million dollars. Paul Schrader wrote the script and Michael Ballhaus directed the camera. The film was considered pure blasphemy by religious fundamentalists of all stripes. Scorsese only shows the death dream of Jesus on the cross. He sees him as a family man with a wife and children, living peacefully and dying peacefully. But unfortunately his sense of mission got in the way. The higher order that forbade him to make things easy for himself.

Scorsese recognizes himself in this: he, too, could have had an easier time if his films were just less profound, brutal and disillusioning. Because he doesn’t sell dreams with his films, on the contrary: he destroys them. For example in “GoodFellas – Three Decades of the Mafia” from 1990, for many Scorsese’s best film. Here he decides to no longer spare the Americans of Italian descent and their “families.” What they offer as protection now appears to be a dangerous mafia principle. He then presents Wall Street, about which he filmed “The Wolf of Wall Street” in 2013, as an equally mafia-like parallel world, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a rising star who sacrifices every bit of humanity for big money.

In 2008, the highly virtuosic documentary “Shine a Light” was the opening film at the Berlinale and shows Martin Scorsese on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A live concert by the Rolling Stones is to be recorded and assembled with scenes from the concert. But for camera and lighting it would be important to know exactly what the band is up to and when. But Mick Jagger & Co played the sadistic card. He’ll see that, they don’t know that themselves. The film team had to have all possible variants ready at all times. I remember that after that opening film my nerves were also tense to breaking point. Back then, the Berlinale always showed the opening film to the press just before the festival premiere. Afterwards I ran to my computer and wrote the text as quickly as I could for the free space in this newspaper. But on that day everything that could technically only go wrong went wrong – and the text only arrived a few minutes before the ultimate start of printing. Is this the ultimate kick? A look at Scorsese, who portrays himself in “Shine a Light,” shows: No, it’s hell.

At heart, Scorsese is a family man even in his work. For him, this is the opposite of a mafia godfather who uses his power. Since the boxer film “Like a Wild Bull” from 1980, he has always worked with the same editor: Thelma Schoonmaker. And with Michael Ballhaus, the Fassbinder cameraman who went to Hollywood, he made important films from 1985 until his death, from “The Color of Money” to “Departed – Among Enemies” from 2006.

His most important actor is undoubtedly Robert De Niro, who grew up in Little Italy in Manhattan. He plays the role of his alter ego perfectly. With him in the lead role, he had his international breakthrough with “Taxi Driver” from 1976. A returnee from Vietnam suffers from mental disorders and insomnia and begins driving a taxi through New York at night. He is full of aggression against all the dirt of the big city. His inner monologue, which accompanies us through the film, is that of an assassin: “When it gets dark, the rabble appear, whores, fraudsters, broken drunks… I hope one day a big rain will wash away all this scum. « Here the other side of America’s patriotic lies is exposed: a clean-cut ideology that is just as shocking as the drug swamp.

Scorsese remains true to his gangster theme as part of American society. In 2019 in “The Irishman” we meet Robert de Niro again as the elderly contract killer Frank Sheeran in a retirement home. He wants to take his dangerous secrets about the death of a union leader to his grave. Scorsese’s last film for the time being, “Killers of the Flower Moon” (with Leonardo DiCaprio), is also something special. It’s about the Osage, who were given a new reservation in Oklahoma by the US government in the 1920s. But then oil is discovered there and all agreements give way to excessive greed. A never-ending series of murders ensues. Scorsese, now over 80 years old, once again bathes the American myth of the land of opportunity in blood-red color.