'People tell me that I am incapable of telling a story. I don't care. I have other things to say. And another way to say them.' For all his lack of concern with the commercialism of cinema, Martin Scorsese has nevertheless made pictures which have sold well. Starting out as a respected editor, he went on to exploit his Italian-American origins in the films he has directed. His success has certainly earned him a place in the vanguard of the new American cinema

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Peter Hayden's 1978 documentary about Martin Scorsese is appropriately entitled Movies Are My Life, for no other director of the new American cinema has quite so completely managed to merge the concerns of his personal life with older film genres which helped to form his consciousness of life and cinema. An Italian-American of the third generation, Scorsese was born in 1942 in Flushing, New York, but his parents moved to Little Italy in 1950, so that it was in the Italian, Catholic milieu of Manhattan that he grew up. His asthma prevented the more strenuous pastimes; as partial recompense his father took him to the movies at least twice a week, which inspired him to draw his own story-boards for imaginary films. He now says that when thinking back over his childhood, he often confuses events that really happened with events from Alice Faye vehicles or the films of John Ford and Samuel Fuller.

At 14 he decided he wanted to be a priest, but rock'n'roll, movies on 42nd Street and his gang pals on Lower East Side, New York, interested him more than the Church and took more of his time than his studies. Instead, in 1963, he enrolled in the English Department of New York University where he found himself more interested in cinema courses and was encouraged in his interest by Professor Haig Manoogian, to whom Raging Bull (1980) is dedicated. Among his fellow students and friends were Brian De Palma (through whom he met Robert De Niro), cameraman Michael Wadleigh (who later directed Woodstock, 1970) and Mardik Martin, who worked on several scripts with Scorsese.

A growing awareness of the French nouvelle vague from screenings at the New York Film Festival helped him to see the possibility of making personal films under almost amateur circumstances. At any rate, it is clear from his second 16mm short made at NYU - It's Not Just You, Murray (1965) - what sort of cinema was to be Scorsese's major influence: that film ends with a production number (Love Is a Gazelle) in the manner of Busby Berkeley, a perfect example of popular American movies of the Thirties and Forties. That same film also indicated other central concerns which were to be developed in later films: It's Not Just You, Murray is a semi-fictionalized portrait of his uncle, set in Little Italy.

Dress rehearsals

In 1965 he attempted to make a 35mm feature - Bring on the Dancing Girls >>><<- a semi-autobiographical story. About a young man, raised in Little Italy as a Catholic, the film shows how a young girl brings confusion to his macho sense of 'angel or whore'. The S6000 Scorsese had borrowed for the film did not last long and he abandoned the project until 1967 when Haig Manoogian encouraged him to try it again, this time in an economically more realistic 16mm. The result was I Call First - released in 1968 under the title Who's That Knocking at My Door? - with Zina Bethune and Harvey Keitel. Seen now, the film has its own nervous intensity, a fine performance by Keitel, and striking black-and-white images, but seems something of a dress rehearsal for Mean Streets (1973) - itself already 'in the air' as a script.

After finishing Who's That Knocking at My Door? Scorsese made a 16mm short, The Big Shave (1967), which was a hit at the Experimental Film Festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium. He stayed in Europe with cameraman Richard Coll and made publicity films for six months and co-wrote Pim de la Parra and Wim Verstappen's Obsessions (1969) in Holland. His reputation as an editor took him to Hollywood, and while editing and supervising post-production for Francois Reichenbach's Medicine Ball Caravan (1971), Scorsese met American International Pictures exploitation producer Roger Corman who hired him to make an action film 'for the guys on 42nd Street'.

The producer expected something of a sequel to his own film Bloody Mama (1970). Instead, Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha (1972) is a strange meditation, with bursts of violence, on roving union organizers and other outcasts of the Depression. AIP was somewhat disconcerted and did not quite know what to do with the film, since Scorsese had doctored the screenplay to some extent. Nevertheless, Boxcar Bertha and its director had their supporters in the film industry and on the festival circuit, and they advised Scorsese to make a film to which he was more totally committed than this impersonal commercial exploitation work.

Italy isn't here any more

That film was Mean Streets, made for $550,000, which became a hit at both the New York Film Festival and in the 'Directors' Fortnight' at Cannes. The film is a portrait of a generation of Italian-Americans in the ghetto of Little Italy, caught between the Mafia and the Church. Harvey Keitel again plays a variation of Scorsese himself, attempting to free himself of his Catholic background and yet to 'save' those around him, particularly his best friend and his friend's epileptic sister . . . with catastrophic results. Part of the film's excitement comes from the use of rock music, not only to underscore period but to comment on emotional states and point to how popular culture helps determine character.

For all its personal concerns, Mean Streets is very much a genre film, in a tradition that dates back at least as far as Angels With Dirty Faces (1938). Looked at from one angle, however, Scorsese has never made anything but genre films . . . but always with a difference. His next feature, Alice Doesnt Live Here Any More (1974) - the story of a widow's search for happiness on a trip across America in which she vacillates between the dream of a career and 'true love' - was in every way a woman's picture in the tradition of Sirk or Capra. It is probably the director's least personal film - Ellen Burstyn, who won an Oscar for her performance, had as much or more to say about the script as Scorsese or writer Robert Getchell. But Scorsese's own concerns are certainly not absent: the beginning in which an extract from an Alice Faye film is used to show how popular movies formed consciousness of identity, for example, or the unbalanced 'angel or whore' violence of the character played by Harvey Keitel, who is at one and the same time generous and loving with Alice, yet brutal to his own wife. Alice Doesnt Live Here Any More showed that at least some of the problems found in Little Italy are also a part of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.

Street life

In 1976 New York City became not only the setting but a major character in Taxi Driver, the film which won the Golden Palm at Cannes and secured Scorsese's reputation as the most talented director of the new American cinema. While the script is by Paul Schrader, there are definite connections between Taxi Driver and Mean Streets. Here, however, the would-be 'saviour' becomes an exterminating angel, a killer praised and honoured for slaughtering a pimp. Ironically, though, it is praise for a paranoid murderer who could easily strike again. The film is a trip through hell with the 'real' city dissolving into an hallucination of odd colours and visual distortions -a hell from which there is no redemption.

Those who praise Scorsese for his 'realism' are missing the point, unless it is his emotional realism they have in mind. There is little difference finally between the way he uses the actual streets of New York in Taxi Driver and the purposely artificial sets of the city he uses in New York, New York (1977). What he had in mind was:

'A movie called New York, New York shot entirely in Los Angeles, which goes back to the old films I used to see as a kid, which reflected part of New York, but that was a fantasy of New York up on the screen. So, in the picture I tried to fuse whatever was a fantasy - the movies I grew up with as a kid - with the reality I experienced myself.'