In the Church by Martin Scorsese: His Complete Works at the Film Museum

Because the US director will soon be 80, a retro film celebrates his stunning and extensive work. Here is the subjective attempt to recommend a handful of masterpieces as an introduction.

Von Christian Fuchs

One could use the buzzword “toxic” to describe the men in Martin Scorsese’s films. But that wouldn’t do justice to the US director’s manic human studies. Scorsese’s cinema is visually stunning on the outside and often trendy, but on the inside it is complex, ambivalent and profound. And therein cavort outsiders, driven, broken lives. Men on the verge of nervous breakdowns and with roof damage.

Almost 80-year-old Scorsese’s breakthrough film is a prime example of his approach to dark masculinity. In “Mean Streets‘, 1973, the director comes to terms with his youth in New York’s Little Italy district. All the small-time crooks, imposters, mafiosi he observes there stagger in slow motion through his brightly colored social study, played by shooting stars of the time like Harvey Keitel or Robert De Niro. The ideal introductory film Scorsese Cinematic Universe.

Park Circus © Warner Bros. Pictures

God’s loneliest man

De Niro becomes a lifelong collaborator with the director. With “Taxi Driverhe mutates into the superstar of New Hollywood. A modern film noir about alienation and rampage in the asphalt jungle of Manhattan, about a distraught Vietnam veteran whose fuses blow. “Loneliness has haunted me my whole life. No matter where I go, it chases me everywhere: in bars, in the car, in coffee shops, cinemas, shops, on walks. There’s no escaping it. I am God’s loneliest man.” Robert De Niro writes this in his notebook as the taxi driver Bickle before he takes up arms.

It runs until October 20th Film museum a comprehensive retrospective by director Martin Scorsese.

For some critics just an epic about a dangerous Incel, for Martin Scorsese and author Paul Schrader, a film about existentialist anger. “The book I reread just before writing it was Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Disgust,’ admits the director, “and if there’s any role model for Taxi Driver, it’s that.”

Austrian Film Museum

The dishonorable family

These were now two obvious must-see films by Martin Scorsese, which today get under your skin even more than when they were made. The Italian-American undermines the usual offers of identification from Hollywood, it’s quite often that bad guyswho are presented to us as anti-heroes in his films.

In this context, at the latest now “Goodfellas“, the ultimate mafia epic, published in 1990. Ray Liotta, who unfortunately passed away this year, shines as Henry Hill, who looks back on his dazzling gangster career. The myth of the “honorable family” is deconstructed here and drowned in blood. The camera a creative delirium, the music stunning, the cast brilliant: Ray Liotta, Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci, this sovereign and fearsome trio sets the tone.

Park Circus © Warner Bros. Pictures

Like A Rolling Stone

Of course you couldRaging Bull’ and many other masterpieces that the Film Museum has in its programme. But it’s also worth mentioning the documentary filmmaker Scorsese and the music fan. Both come in “Shine A Light” together. In 2007, the director presented a live performance by the Rolling Stones on a small scale as a very large cinema. The camera sticks to Mick Jagger & Co., who perform their world hits as well as lesser-known songs in front of an enthusiastic audience. A nod to sweaty rock ‘n’ roll passions.

The workaholic Martin Scorsese doesn’t think about retirement for a second. He works on new projects, as a director, as a producer, cinematic mastermind. In “The Irishman‘ he brought his mafia obsessions to a melodramatic conclusion for Netflix. The probably most exciting film of his late work comes in 2013. After gangster gangs, gambling addicts and murderers, Scorsese presents a greedy stock market wolf in the form of Leonardo Di Caprio.

Austrian Film Museum

The stock market wolf

is murdered in “The Wolf Of Wall Street” Not. If so, then only bank accounts are killed, moral concepts and ethical principles eliminated, souls destroyed. The portrait of million-dollar fraudster Jordan Bellfort is primarily about a merciless all-round attack against the stock market frenzy of the eighties and nineties, against a way of life, against the foundations of the American nightmare.

With his muses Di Caprio and De Niro, Scorsese has just “Killers of the Flower Moon‘, which unfolds a real-life massacre of Native Americans as a true-crime thriller. The former will also play the title role for the director in a biographical drama about President Theodore Roosevelt.

Incidentally, the collective criticism does not bow to Mr. Scorsese. The fact that such a subversive titan of cinema is deeply religious is something some reviewers can’t stomach. Religious fundamentalists, on the other hand, have railed against the violent violence in Scorsese’s stripes. Pseudo-progressives blame him as a conventional storyteller and he’s often too demanding for Hollywood’s commercial machine. We cinephiles, on the other hand, go to Martin Scorsese’s church to pray.