A Companion to Martin Scorsese Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors Series

A Companion to Martin Scorsese

?This valuable book brings the exceptional scale of Martin Scorsese?s film work into clear view. His achievements are monumental, and the essays collected in this work provide wonderfully detailed and vivid analyses of his oeuvre. A comprehensive study of the most exciting filmmaker working today.?
Robert Burgoyne, University of St Andrews

A Companion to Martin Scorsese, Revised Edition is a comprehensive collection of original essays assessing the career of one of America?s most prominent contemporary filmmakers. The first reference work of its kind, this book contains contributions from influential scholars in North America and Europe. The essays use a variety of analytic approaches to study numerous aspects of Scorsese?s work, from his earliest films to his place within the history of American and world cinema. They consider his work in relation to auteur theory, the genres in which he has worked, his use of popular music, and his recent involvement with film preservation. Several of the essays offer fresh interpretations of some of Scorsese?s most influential films, including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, Gangs of New York, Hugo, and The Irishman. Others take a broader approach and discuss the representation of violence, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, race, and other themes across his work. With insights that will interest film scholars as well as movie enthusiasts, this is an important contribution to the scholarship of contemporary American cinema.

Contributors viii

Introduction: Artistic Solutions to Sociological Problems 1
Aaron Baker

Part One The Pious Auteur 15

1 How Scorsese Became Scorsese: A Historiography of New Hollywood’s Most Prestigious Auteur 17
Marc Raymond

2 Smuggling Iconoclasm: European Cinema and Scorsese’s Male Antiheroes 38
Giorgio Bertellini and Jacqueline Reich

3 Italian Films, New York City Television, and the Work of Martin Scorsese 53
Laura E. Ruberto

4 The Imaginary Museum: Martin Scorsese’s Film History Documentaries 71
Robert P. Kolker

5 Images of Religion, Ritual, and the Sacred in Martin Scorsese’s Cinema 91
David Sterritt

Part Two Social Contexts and Conflicts 115

6 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Italianamerican: Gender, Ethnicity, and Imagination 117
Aaron Baker

7 Mobsters and Bluebloods: Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence in the Perspective of his Italian American Films 133
Robert Casillo

8 Off -White Masculinity in Martin Scorsese’s Gangster Films 173
Larissa M. Ennis

9 Irish-American Identity in the Films of Martin Scorsese 195
Matt R. Lohr

10 Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Television Authorship in Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues and Boardwalk Empire 214
Jonathan J. Cavallero

Part Three Form and the Filmmaking Process 237

11 Martin Scorsese and the Music Documentary 239
Michael Brendan Baker

12 Martin Scorsese Rocks 259
Giuliana Muscio

13 Music as Cultural Signifier of Italian/American Life in Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Mean Streets 277
Anthony D. Cavaluzzi

14 When Marty Met Bobby: Collaborative Authorship in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver 292
R. Colin Tait

15 Scorsese’s Landscape of Mortality 312
Murray Pomerance

16 Borderlines: Boundaries and Transgression in the City Films of Martin Scorsese 331
Brendan Kredell

Part Four Major Films 353

17 Mean Streets as Cinema of Independence 355
Stefan Sereda

18 Taxi Driver and Veteran Trauma 373
Michael D. High

19 Filming the Fights: Subjectivity and Sensation in Raging Bull 396
Leger Grindon

20 The Last Temptation of Christ: Queering the Divine 420
Daniel S. Cutrara

21 The Cinematic Seduction of Not a “Good Fella” 442
Bambi Haggins

22 Hugo and the (Re-)Invention of Martin Scorsese 459
Guerric DeBona

Index 480

Aaron Baker is Associate Professor and Area Chair of Film and Media Studies within the English Department at Arizona State University. His research focuses on sports culture, film authorship, and the representation of race, ethnicity, and gender in American cinema. He is co-editor of Out of Bounds: Sports, Media and the Politics of Identity (1997), and the author of Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film (2003) and Steven Soderbergh (2011).