Cinema and Media Studies Martin Scorsese
by
Marc Raymond
  • LAST REVIEWED: 28 November 2022
  • LAST MODIFIED: 28 August 2019
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0320

Introduction

Martin Scorsese’s name has come to symbolize many broad ideas over the past few decades, to the point where he is no longer merely a filmmaker, but rather a cultural touchstone. He is associated with a particular religion (Catholicism), ethnicity (Italian), genre (gangsters), and time period (New Hollywood), while also being the foremost cinephile in American cinema, influencing whole generations in his wake. Consequently, the amount of writing on Scorsese is quite vast, and this bibliography will try to represent that variety while pointing readers to the best of this work. It is thus organized with a focus on Scorsese’s own scholarly contributions, interviews, career overviews, anthologies, major films, documentaries, and influence. There is a temptation to try to divide the work thematically, since so much of the writing centers around either religion, ethnicity, or masculinity, but doing so would risk perpetuating this overemphasis in the scholarship while also not representing the best writing on this important auteur. Thus, while certainly the work on Italian-Catholicism and masculinity will be frequent within the citations to come, they will not predominate among the selections taken as a whole. This bibliography also attempts to give some of the history of Scorsese scholarship itself, focusing on scholarly touchstones that tended to define particular historical moments and how Scorsese has been useful to particular critical approaches and/or arguments.

Writings and Teachings by Martin Scorsese

A key aspect of Scorsese as a filmmaker is his passion about the medium itself and his desire to engage in and even initiate public debates on film related topics, as is already evident in Scorsese 1978, a “Guilty Pleasures” column in Film Comment. Most famous was his campaign against Eastman Kodak in the early 1980s to improve their color film stock to prevent fading, which led to Scorsese becoming a leading voice of film preservation. The Film Foundation Website website provides information on these preservation activities, and the Story of Movies Film Literacy Program gives a curriculum for high school movie education. Furthermore, Masterclass: Martin Scorsese Teaches Filmmaking is a full, paid online course for aspiring directors. Scorsese’s authority as a teacher of film has enabled him to intervene on public debates related to filmmakers and the medium, as can be witnessed in Scorsese 1993 and, most recently, in Scorsese 2013. Scorsese and Wilson 1997 and Guralnick, et al. 2003 are companion pieces to Scorsese’s work as both a film and cultural historian in the documentary medium, and his guest editorship of Civilization magazine shows how widely his cultural prestige has spread. A fuller list of Scorsese’s various writings (up to 2012) appears in Raymond 2013 (pp. 227–228, cited under Books).

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