A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

Dir. Martin Scorsese. 1995, 225 mins. Digital projection. This three-part series produced by the British Film Institute sees director, scholar, and lifelong cinephile Martin Scorsese discussing and dissecting a selection of his favorite American films. The wide-ranging exploration is organized around four different types of directors: the director as storyteller (John Ford, King Vidor, Frank Capra), with forays into various genre films, the director as an illusionist (D.W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau), the director as a smuggler of subversive images and ideas (Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller, Vincente Minnelli), and the director as an iconoclast (Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray). Throughout, Scorsese serves as an infectiously enthusiastic and exhilaratingly articulate ambassador for the cinema he loves.