Martin Scorsese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies

Cin­e­ma as we’ve almost always known it — “Edi­son, the Lumière broth­ers, Méliès, Porter, all the way through Grif­fith and on to Kubrick”  — has “real­ly almost gone.” So writes Mar­tin Scors­ese in his recent essay for the New York Review of Books, “The Per­sist­ing Vision: Read­ing the Lan­guage of Cin­e­ma.” He argues that tra­di­tion­al film forms have “been over­whelmed by mov­ing images com­ing at us all the time and absolute­ly every­where, even faster than the visions com­ing at the astro­naut” in Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “We have no choice but to treat all these mov­ing images com­ing at us as a lan­guage. We need to be able to under­stand what we’re see­ing and find the tools to sort it all out.” Only nat­ur­al that Scors­ese, as one of the best-known, high­est-pro­file auteurs alive, would ref­er­ence Kubrick, his gen­er­a­tional pre­de­ces­sor in the untir­ing fur­ther­ance of cin­e­mat­ic vision and craft.

We just yes­ter­day fea­tured a post about Kubrick­’s 1963 list of ten favorite films. Scors­ese, for his part, has impressed many as one of the most enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly cinephilic direc­tors work­ing in Amer­i­ca today: his essays about and appear­ances on the DVDs of his favorite movies stand as evi­dence for the sur­pris­ing breadth of his appre­ci­a­tion. Today, why not have a look at Scors­ese’s list, which he put togeth­er for Sight and Sound mag­a­zine, and which begins with the Kubrick selec­tion you might expect:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – Stan­ley Kubrick
• 8½ (1963) – Fed­eri­co Felli­ni
• Ash­es and Dia­monds (1958) – Andrzej Waj­da
• Cit­i­zen Kane (1941) – Orson Welles
• The Leop­ard (1963) – Luchi­no Vis­con­ti
• Paisan (1946) – Rober­to Rosselli­ni
• The Red Shoes (1948) – Michael Powell/Emeric Press­burg­er
• The Riv­er (1951) – Jean Renoir
• Sal­va­tore Giu­liano (1962) – Francesco Rosi
• The Searchers (1956) – John Ford
• Uget­su Mono­gatari (1953) – Mizoguchi Ken­ji
• Ver­ti­go (1958) – Alfred Hitch­cock

In “The Per­sist­ing Vision,” he cham­pi­ons com­pre­hen­sive film preser­va­tion, cit­ing the case of Hitch­cock­’s Ver­ti­go, the final entry on his list, now named the great­est film of all time by Sight and Sound’s crit­ics poll. “When the film came out some peo­ple liked it, some didn’t, and then it just went away.” When, after decades of obscu­ri­ty, Ver­ti­go came back into cir­cu­la­tion,  the col­or was com­plete­ly wrong,” and “the ele­ments — the orig­i­nal pic­ture and sound neg­a­tives — need­ed seri­ous atten­tion.” A restora­tion of the “decay­ing and severe­ly dam­aged” film even­tu­al­ly hap­pened, and “more and more peo­ple saw Ver­ti­go and came to appre­ci­ate its hyp­not­ic beau­ty and very strange, obses­sive focus.” I, per­son­al­ly, could­n’t imag­ine the world of cin­e­ma with­out it — nor with­out any of the oth­er pic­tures Scors­ese calls his favorites.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspir­ing Film­mak­er Needs to See

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

Revis­it Mar­tin Scorsese’s Hand-Drawn Sto­ry­boards for Taxi Dri­ver

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

Mar­tin Scors­ese Brings “Lost” Hitch­cock Film to Screen in Short Faux Doc­u­men­tary

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.