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There are few guides through cinematic history as genuinely exciting or enthusiastic as Martin Scorsese. “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies” and “My Voyage to Italy” are absolutely vital viewing, and any interview with the filmmaker is more than ample proof he knows the medium almost better than anyone. And if you ever dreamed of having Scorsese teach you the craft, well it’s happening.

Continue reading Martin Scorsese MasterClass Trailer: The Legend Has Some Lessons For You at The Playlist.

How did Kiss Me Deadly come to be restored? The real question should be, how did filmdom lose track of its original ending in the first place? Savant uncovers evidence that may explain when, and why, United Artists mutilated the finish of Robert Aldrich’s apocalyptic film noir.

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Before home video the final home for Hollywood films was Television. Robert Aldrich’s 1955 Kiss Me Deadly never saw a theatrical reissue, and it dropped out of major TV visibility in 1962. I saw the documentation in United Artists’ legal folder on the film. To secure capital to launch more movies, Robert Aldrich sold all of his ‘Associates and Aldrich’ pictures back to UA after their original releases were concluded. More papers showed Kiss Me Deadly being included in at least two TV syndication packages, and then each time pointedly removed.

The Museum of the Moving Image has been celebrating and exploring filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s life, work, and his passion for cinema since December with a terrific exhibit drawing extensively from Scorsese’s own collection of key production material, objects from his childhood, behind-the-scenes images, and large-scale projections of scenes from his work and more. For the final weekend of the exhibit, Momi put on a full-blown retrospective of his work over two days featuring the lesser-seen, more personal Scorsese films, “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies,” “My Voyage to Italy (Il mio viaggio in Italia)” and docs like “No Direction Home” and “The Last Waltz.”

However, it was the impressive panel after the screening of“Silence” that brought a special salute to the exhibit in its entirety, which included cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, screenwriter Jay Cocks, who along with co-writing “Silence,” also co-wrote “The Age of Innocence” and “Gangs of New York,...

There aren’t many films in the documentary-as-cinematic-guide genre, but Martin Scorsese has directed two of the greatest with “A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies” and “My Voyage To Italy,” both of which, if the titles didn’t tip you off, are wonderful overviews of American and Italian cinema by the always engaging and passionate filmmaker. Now Bertrand Tavernier has done something similar with the three-hour-plus “A Journey Through French Cinema.”

Read More: Retrospective: The Films Of Martin Scorsese

Premiering earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, the film largely focuses on French cinema from the 1930s to the 1970s, with Tavernier highlighting directors both famous and obscure, as he details countless films, scenes, influences and more that have marked the medium in the country.

Continue reading Discover Cinematic History With The Trailer For Bertrand Tavernier’s Documentary ‘A Journey Through French Cinema’ at The Playlist.

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Some of the best filmmakers working today are renowned for their passion for cinema as an art form – Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino are all known for their cinephilia, and their vast knowledge of movies shines through in each of their films.

Martin Scorsese, however, is considered by many to be the ultimate filmmaker’s director. With an illustrious career spanning decades, his filmography is a rich reflection of his encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of cinema, while his activities outside of his own filmmaking demonstrates an enthusiasm for restoring and reviving hidden gems from around the world.

This obsession is perhaps best reflected in his book and documentary series A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies – a 225 minute foray into the obscure and influential movies which shaped both the medium and his own approach to movies. Its comprehensive nature has perhaps only...

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will open the 2014 edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival with the world premiere of a brand new restoration of the beloved Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1955). TCM’s own Robert Osborne, who serves as official host for the festival, will introduce Oklahoma!, with the film’s star, Academy Award®-winner Shirley Jones, in attendance. Vanity Fair will also return for the fifth year as a festival partner and co-presenter of the opening night after-party. Marking its fifth year, the TCM Classic Film Festival will take place April 10-13, 2014, in Hollywood. The gathering will coincide withTCM’s 20th anniversary as a leading authority in classic film.

In addition, the festival has added several high-profile guests to this year’s lineup, including Oscar®-winning director William Friedkin, who will attend for the screening of the U.S. premiere restoration of his suspenseful cult classic Sorcerer (1977); Kim Novak, who...

There are few filmmakers -- or people -- as dedicated, knowledgeable and passionate about cinema and its history as Martin Scorsese. A virtual walking encyclopedia about any corner of film lore you can think of, he remains fascinated and excited by movies and filmmakers, but in particular is concerned with making sure the early days of the art form aren't lost to the dusts of time. Through The Film Foundation and the World Cinema Foundation, he has worked tirelessly to preserve and restore films for future generations. Always an immensely compelling person to hear discuss film (just see "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies" or "My Voyage To Italy" if you need proof), this brief little video is worth a spin. Recorded for the upcoming Toute la Mémoire du Monde: Festival International du Film Restauré, where Scorsese was allowed to select a handful of films to be screened,...

I’m perfectly content to just label Martin Scorsese one of the most talented filmmakers of all time and call it a day — but I fear that would, ultimately, neglect his status as a true film historian. The living master has already exhibited his vast knowledge and deep understanding of film as an art form in two comprehensive documentaries — A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy — then expressed it to the masses this past fall with a near-masterpiece, Hugo.

It’s mind-boggling to even consider how many films Scorsese‘s seen by the age of 69 — even more interesting, though, would be that exclusive list of his favorites. And while I can’t definitively say if this list supplied to Fast Company (consisting of 85 films) would be identical, I’m nevertheless fascinated to read off these titles, along with the commentary he provides on a select few.

"There have been lots of books that tell the history of the movies, but so far almost no films," Mark Cousins told indieWIRE's Peter Knegt last September. We should qualify that statement, of course. As Nick Pinkerton notes in the Voice, there have been documentaries on the history of cinema, though some might filter that history "through the director's particular prejudices or national heritage (Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma, finally released on DVD last December; Oshima's 100 Years of Japanese Cinema; A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies). Or it might mean sticking to one facet of the timeline, as in historian Kevin Brownlow's extraordinary work on the medium's adolescence, Hollywood."

That point made, back to Cousins: "You can sit in a room to write a book about movies, but to tell the story of how a flickering Victorian novelty became a global art form on film, you have to travel the world,...

An audience with Scorsese isn't like a typical junket interview with a big-name American director. That is made very clear in Michael Henry Wilson's new book, Scorsese on Scorsese. This features a series of discussions that Wilson has had with Scorsese about his films, from 1974 right up to the present day. Their encounters are confessional, therapeutic, invariably littered with references to other movies and often highly technical. Wilson (who co-wrote Scorsese's masterful documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and is now working with him on his new doc about British cinema) is reverential towards his subject, but also very probing. The metaphors used here are often about illness, addiction and transcendence: a strange mix of the biblical and the psychoanalytical. "Film is a disease... as with heroin, the antidote to film is more film," Scorsese once observed, quoting his fellow director Frank Capra. He is clearly contaminated with this disease.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

With a filmography boasting some of the most important and entertaining films of the last forty years, from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to The Departed and Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese could be forgiven for resting on his laurels or at least taking a nice relaxing holiday. Yet this doesn’t seem to be in his make-up. A dedicated cinephile and music lover, the director has been an equally prolific documentarian over the years and the results are rarely less than spellbinding, with his chosen subject matter always deeply personal.

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) and My Voyage to Italy (1999) – which is released on DVD tomorrow – are among the best of these movies, with Marty himself narrating – passionately sharing his thoughts on the films which have inspired him in an accessible, unpretentious style. Aided by his own touching reminiscences as well as...

To most the question of what is your favourite Martin Scorsese film is one that will be answered with very few answers. Taxi Driver most likely but if not that then probably Raging Bull or Godfellas. There’ll probably even be a few that would opt for King of Comedy, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed or even Shutter Island but one thing would most likely be near unanimous, the film picked would be a fiction film. When asked this question recently I answered without a seconds pause, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (a slight cheat as this is better known as a TV series but it has been shown theatrically).

Scorsese’s 1995 documentary A Personal Journey… to me is probably the best thing Scorsese has ever made and is the only film of his that I have never tired of watching. Over the...

THR has the exciting news that Oscilloscope will release We Can’t Go Home Again, a movie from the influential, late director Nicholas Ray. Originally shot in the early ’70s, this documentary follows Ray as he teaches “filmmaking to a novice crew” — who were his students at Suny Binghamton — which he did during the making of a feature. Its premiere was held at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, although he kept shooting additional parts and editing the whole thing up to his death in 1979. This late release more or less makes it his final film, an honor previously held by Lightning Over Water, a documentary he co-directed with Wim Wenders. An appearance at Venice and Nyff is expected, with a general opening set for this fall.

Also coming to us from Oscilloscope in the near future is a documentary on Ray, titled Don’t Expect Too Much. Directed by his wife,...

We all know Martin Scorsese is a huge connoisseur of classic cinema and I wouldn’t be surprised if he has seen every film Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made together, knowing all of them intimately – every beat, every line of dialogue and the background to each in a scholar-esque, academic fashion.

Outside of his personal documentaries about film like the 4 hour love letter to Hollywood with 1995′s A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, Scorsese has surprisingly very rarely let his love for the cinema of yesteryear touch any of his films head-on, except of course in sections of The Aviator where in something of a frenzy he threw Ava Gardner, Jean Harlow, Errol Flynn, Katherine Hepburn etc at us. Though Paramount have just won a bidding war to acquire a property that could change all that.

Deadline say the studio have acquired the rights to Furious Love,...

As you should know by now, Martin Scorsese is a scholar and lover of classic cinema. And while he's expounded on his passion in documentaries like "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies," "My Voyage to Italy" and more recently "A Letter to Elia" it's surprising he's never done a feature film about the cinematic era of yore (though he did touch on it briefly in "The Aviator"). But it looks like that may change. Deadline reports that Paramount have optioned the rights to Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger's "Furious Love" about the legendary, torrid, tabloid-worthy relationship between…...

James Cagney, the quintessential movie gangster

Seemingly always en vogue, gangsters have been especially so in recent years. The grand seigneur of American cinema, Martin Scorsese, finally won his long-deserved first Academy Award for Best Achievement in Directing for “The Departed” in 2007. Michael Mann’s 2009 effort “Public Enemies” was a big-budget production with high-dollar stars. The HBO drama “The Sopranos” attracted millions of viewers per week for eight years. “Sopranos” writer Terry Winter teamed up with Scorsese in 2010 for another acclaimed gangster series, “Boardwalk Empire,” which won two Golden Globes earlier this year. Warner Bros., the studio that invented the gangster film, is hoping to get back in the game with a revival of the classic genre.[1] And Scorsese, who made his name with gangster films like “Mean Streets,” “GoodFellas” and “Casino,” will likely return to the genre with mafioso thesps Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino in...

Every movie buff appreciates a cinematic list. The arrival of vast information on a subject we love so dearly will always be welcomed with open arms. And what better than the esteemed list of all-time greatest films? Whether it’s a monumental effort like Empire’s The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time, or the country-specific AFI list of 100 Greatest American Films, there’s no denying the lasting appeal and insight a list can offer to reminiscence about old favourites and to put us on our way for new discoveries. After all, they’re usually spot on, having polled critics, filmmakers, and a devoted public who know exactly what makes a motion picture entertaining, important and timeless.

The problem is, of course, that after so many years, we’re used to reading the same old lists over and over again – how many times have we been told that The Godfather or...

There are a few filmmakers we wish could also be our film professors. But none more so than Martin Scorsese, who at least has given us film history lessons in the documentaries A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy. Now he's back with collaborator Kent Jones for a one-hour "mini-masterclass" about the works of legendary director Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront; East of Eden). Its title is A Letter to Elia, and we're happy to debut the one-sheet, which you'll find in full after the jump.

The doc focuses directly on Kazan's films, what they mean to Scorsese and what they tell us about the man who made them. "Maybe you learn more from the work than the man," Scorsese says about why interviews and biographies aren't enough for a study of an artist. As for how Kazan's films affected his own life,...

This week one of the great "unseen" American films, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956), makes its debut on Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray. Over the years, it has been selected for things like Film Comment's best movies unreleased on video, Jonathan Rosenbaum's 100 greatest films, and Jean-Luc Godard's ten greatest American films. Martin Scorsese included a tantalizing clip of it in his great 1995 documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. In 2002, a screening of it turned up in my town. I saw it along with about 100 other lucky people and was able to confirm its greatness.

What's peculiar is that it came just a year after Ray's big hit Rebel Without a Cause, which is one of the best-known and most iconic of all American films. So what happened to Bigger Than Life? Why has it become such a rarity? I'm not really sure, save to say that it was extremely controversial,...

Scorsese triumphs with a powerful noir pastiche that sends Leonardo DiCaprio into a world of madness and paranoia

Susan Sontag greeted the centenary of the cinema with an essay proclaiming its "ignominious, irreversible decline". She added that "the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative film-making… every film that hopes to reach the highest possible audience is designed as some kind of remake". How does that sound 15 years later? Well, the two most striking films this week, Shutter Island and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and the one we're most looking forward to next month, Polanski's The Ghost, all centre on troubled protagonists lured to remote islands to investigate disappearances and past mysteries that threaten their lives. Is this chance, the mythic underpinning of narrative, or cultural exhaustion?

Having made this pious observation, let me declare that Shutter Island, adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from Dennis Lehane...

Name a happy family in a Martin Scorsese film. Or a stable couple, even. In Cape Fear, the director is asked to update the scenario of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 thriller, in which the ideal household is terrorized by an evil-incarnate maniac. “One for them, one for me,” Scorsese says of the rotation between personal projects and commercial assignments artists are often forced into. Sandwiched between Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence, this would clearly be “one for them,” the “them” being star Robert De Niro and executive producer Steven Spielberg. As an addition to De Niro’s sadistic rogues gallery and Amblin Entertainment’s portraits of threatened suburbia, the project may have seemed like a sure bet. But Scorsese is too much of a self-consciously anguished aesthete to take a smooth detour into Blockbuster Road. In his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, he would...

In January, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) will bestow the Honorary Cecile B. DeMille Award to Martin Scorsese for “his outstanding contribution to the entertainment field,” to which we say “Congratulations, Mr. Scorsese.” Of course, any award honoring Scorsese’s career is well-earned by the prolific and influential director. His lengthy and diverse filmography naturally contains movies which flopped and received no support from film critics, but when you look at his hits, he has left an unforgettable stamp on not only American cinema, but on audiences the world over. That his work continues to improve and defy simple definition is an inspiration to aspiring filmmakers and a challenge to his peers. There’s only one complaint people have about the awards Scorsese receives: they’re overdue.

Hit the jump to read the full press release. The 67th Annual Golden Globes will air on January 17, 2010. Martin Scorsese’s next film,...

Martin Scorsese will be honored at The 67th Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 17 with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for his "outstanding contribution to the entertainment field." The award, voted by the Board of Directors of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, was announced by Vera Farmiga at a morning press conference. The show, hosted by Ricky Gervais, will be broadcast live coast to coast Sunday, January 17 on NBC (5 to 8 pm Pt, 8 to 11 pm Et) from The Beverly Hilton.

Scorsese received two Golden Globe Awards for "Best Director of a Motion Picture"; for The Departed and Gangs of New York. He received five additional Golden Globe nominations, including four as Best Director (Casino, Age of Innocence, Goodfellas and Raging Bull) and one for Best Screenplay for Raging Bull (with Nicolas Pileggi).

Recent Cecil B. DeMille winners include Steven Spielberg (2009), Warren Beatty (2007), Anthony Hopkins (2006), Robin Williams (2005) and Michael Douglas (2004).

Martin Scorsese...