Thoughts on Martin Scorsese’s New York Times op-ed
Martin Scorsese has given his all to cinema. Cinema that he defines as “about aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation”. He talks about it as something that is, “about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”
He has taken the support of films when he had to express his spiritual beliefs, he got himself busy with “Raging Bull” to get over his cocaine addiction. This is a man who has always seen cinema as an expression of human emotion. It is deeply personal to him and is much more than just entertainment or a money-making device. So when his musical “New York, New York” failed to reach people because “Star Wars” was still running in theatres it probably laid the foundation of his distaste for franchise films.
He was out there collaborating with like-minded people, churning out cinema of his own, while his contemporaries George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had mastered franchise-based cinema. So don’t take his criticism of the Marvel cinematic universe at face value. There is a lot where that comes from.
His New York Times op-ed is a heartfelt expression of his thoughts on cinema. The article doesn’t just try to repair his older statements but it also acts as an attempt to call out moviegoers who can help bring back the balance to show business.
What I admire is the way he talks about these franchise films. He doesn’t reject them as Francis Ford Coppola did. He says it is about his temperament and probably has something to do with his age. It is great to see a man who has had to tussle for indie cinema all his life embrace this so candidly. It pains him to see that his kind of cinema is being marginalised by films that run on formulas and are dictated by business models. And it pains me that that kind of cinema is going to be even more difficult to find in theatres.
The article is important. Enthusiasts of this kind of cinema can go all around town telling people to go see the new indie film that just released or could persuade people to go to the local film festival. But they can’t convince people. That is something that is in the hands of publications such as the New York Times.
You don’t see artists like Scorsese expressing their opinions in newspapers. Such impassioned write-ups from artists are not easy to find. So maybe the coverage given to this issue will help Scorsese’s new film. Marvel fans may check it out on Netflix, maybe out of spite, maybe because they wanna know what this guy is all about.
Talking about Alfred Hitchcock’s films he says, “Sixty or 70 years later, we’re still watching those pictures and marveling at them. But is it the thrills and the shocks that we keep going back to? I don’t think so. The set pieces in “North by Northwest” are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story or the absolute lostness of Cary Grant’s character.”
So sixty or 70 years later, when we think about “Avenger’s: Endgame” again, will we be thinking of the beautifully crafted war sequence or will we be thinking about the character that we lost at the end of it? That was the one time that the marvel cinematic universe put us in genuine emotional danger, and that is what will stay with us.
Martin Scorsese isn’t wrong. He just happens to have an informed opinion.
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