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Two Takes on Cinema: Scorsese and Altman
| Article
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10260 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1993 |
2,769 Words |
| Author
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Lloyd Eby
Lloyd Eby has worked in film and video since 1970 and has
published articles on the interaction of film and religion.
With René Berger, he coedited the book Art
and Technology (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986).
He is assistant senior editor in the Currents in Modern
Thought
section of The World & I. |
This past autumn saw the release of films by two of America's most acclaimed directors: Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. In The Age of Innocence, a faithful adaptation of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Scorsese moved from his usual working-class contemporary New York to the city's glittering high society of the 1870s. For Short Cuts, Altman used the short stories of Raymond Carver, interweaving approximately ten story lines to record the strange cruelties that lurk beneath the banality of contemporary American life. As in previous films, he depicts a world whose center is somehow missing, where dysfunction is universal--a world that he observes with an ironic, but distant, eye.
Both of these directors have garnered high praise from critics and many awards for their works. Both are known for their originality. Each makes films that are disturbing revelations of (usually) contemporary life, works that also have universal implications. But there are important differences in the way these two make films, the themes they take up, and the view of life they give us.
Since the appearance of his breakthrough movie Mean Streets in 1973, Martin Scorsese has become one of the half-dozen or fewer premiere American film directors. His highly original, intense, angst-filled films have defined a genre, centering on urban, mostly lower-class people who are often gangsters and criminals. Scorsese's movies are hot, both cinematically and emotionally, presenting stories often centered on Italian-American ethnics. At the end of 1989, a number of polls of critics named Scorsese's Raging Bull, the story of boxer Jake La Motta, the best film of the decade. Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, and the recent Cape Fear (all using the actor Robert De Niro, who has appeared in many Scorsese films, and who has been the paint that most fits Scorsese's brush) all set a high standard of cinematic artistry, based on the depiction of often nasty, mean, psychopathic, and sociopathic characters and their situations.
Scorsese's one great failure, The Last Temptation of Christ (though it, too, had its great scenes and moments), occurred when he attempted to make a film about a milieu and sensibility too foreign and unknown to him. (Even in that case, however, very few critics said, "Sorry Marty, this one doesn't make it," probably because they were so captivated with his previous work that they didn't want to knock this one, and--more importantly--because they didn't want to seem to agree with the religious people who attacked the film bitterly and mounted many large and noisy street protests
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