Originally Posted by
baby doll
I find this a rather peculiar argument: namely that Scorsese's derivative remixes are just as great as the work of more original filmmakers because he's adept at swiping ideas. First of all, I think this overstates just how derivative Scorsese's films actually are. It was never my argument that Scorsese's pastiches of classical Hollywood and European art cinema are as mechanical as, for instance, Woody Allen's appropriations of Bergman and Fellini in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Celebrity (although Casino comes close). On the contrary, my point is that Scorsese's eclecticism in swiping from a range of sources is a large part of what makes him a relatively lively filmmaker in the context of the New Hollywood period and its aftermath (for the most part, a pretty depressing era in American moviemaking)--a point Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson already put their finger on in the mid-'70s when they wrote that Taxi Driver ravishes "the auteur box of Sixties best scenes, from Hitchcock's reverse track down a staircase from the Frenzy brutality, through Godard's handwriting gig flashed across the entire screen, to several Mike Snow inventions (the slow Wavelength zoom into a close look at graphics pinned on a beaten plaster wall, and the reprise of double and triple exposures that ends Back and Forth)." At his best, Scorsese is about as exciting as a filmmaker can be without access to a living tradition, but in the absence of a tradition capable of generating new stories and styles, he's unable to do anything truly original. Hollywood cinema is dead and Scorsese is a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together parts from different corpses and trying to reanimate them. The results are frequently entertaining but it strikes me as rather astonishing to claim that they equal the work of genuinely innovative filmmakers like Hitchcock, Godard, and Snow for the reasons I've already stated: If something's been done, there's no need to do it again, and in doing it again anyway, Scorsese fails to find a mode of representation suitable for the present. He's American cinema's greatest cover band.