Powell Godard Scorsese: Influence-Genealogy-Intertextuality
2012; Volume: 89; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Cinema and Culture
ResumoThis paper charts some connections apparent within the work of three filmmakers of different national origins who operated or operate within different institutional circumstances. In unpacking these connections, the paper, while implicitly underscoring the mongrel indebtedness of each cinematic instance, as well locates the discussed filmmaking, and its affiliation, with respect to shaping material and conceptual contexts. Further, as the overlapping careers of the considered filmmakers cover a period from the 1930s to the present day, so there is enabled not just a mapping of relations formal, stylistic, and in terms of subject matter, but the examination of wider--and historically more substantive--concerns political, epistemological, and ontological. Informed by an investment in the continuing, critical pertinence of certain modernist prescriptions and filmic practices, the paper proceeds ultimately to address the enormity of the associable phenomena of postmodernism and digital imaging, the implications of which regarding cinema are, arguably, fatal. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE COMPOSED FILM, SCORSESE, AND THE NOUVELLE VAGUE (AND AFTER) Michael Powell was fond of citing Rudyard Kipling's maxim 'All art is one, man-one! Such finds clearest expression in Powell's filmmaking through his notion of the 'composed film', in which 'music, emotion and acting made a complete whole, of which the music was the master' (2)--an approach that, while essayed during the conclusion of Black Narcissus (Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947) and 'The Ballet of the Red Shoes' sequence in The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, 1948), was, for Powell, 'finally achieved' in The Tales of Hoffmann (Powell and Pressburger, 1951). (3) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is also an approach that finds recurrent reflection in the filmmaking of Powell's most famous champion, Martin Scorsese. Even excepting the concert films The Last Waltz (Scorsese, 1978) and Shine a Light (Scorsese, 2008), wherein shot selection is motivated largely by the specificities of the music that is shown as being performed, the idea of the composed film resonates through differing scenes and situations across his work. Note, for example, among other instances, the slow-motion party scene in Who's That Knocking at My Door (Scorsese, 1969), whose representation of eventually threatening masculine posturing is accompanied by Ray Barretto's 'El Watusi'; the scenes in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Scorsese, 1974) of Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn) practicing and performing at the piano, during which camerawork and editing accord with her singing of various standards; the scene in The Color of Money (Scorsese, 1986) that shows Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise) playing pool extravagantly to the accompaniment of Warren Zevon's 'Werewolves of London'; the sequence in GoodFellas (Scorsese, 1990) that represents Henry Hill (Ray Liotla)'s last, fraught, coked-up day as a gangster, in which action is closely attuned to recordings by Harry Nilsson, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Muddy Waters, and George Harrison; or the scene in Bringing Out the Dead (Scorsese, 1999) in which Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) drives maniacally with Tom Wolls (Tom Sizemore), which proffers a close image-sound correlation of undercranked filming and The Clash's 'Janie Jones'. Nowhere, however, is the influence of Powell's attempts at the composed film more apparent than in Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973). Witness not least the representation of the initial diegetic entries of Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and of Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) into Tony (David Proval)'s bar, which are accompanied, to express empathetic effect, by a pair of songs by, again, The Rolling Stones, 'Tell Me' and 'Jumpin' Jack Flash1. (4) Ancillary details, moreover, underscore the implication of Powell's filmmaking. The emphatic red lighting of Tony's bar--which, retrospectively a signal stylistic element of Scorsese's authorial discourse, Scorsese has admitted that he 'got' from Powell's films5--recalls that during the climactic scenes of Black Narcissus or the 'Tale of Giulietta' episode of The Tales of Hoffmann, while the use of slow motion harks back to the manipulation of shot speed throughout Powell's work. …
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