Martin Scorsese Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, and More

“Did Scorsese make the best movie of each decade since the ’70s?” asks GQ‘s Zach Baron in a recent profile of that long-lived auteur. “Probably not (I think his case is weakest in the first decade of this century), but you could argue it, and many people have.” And indeed, you may well find yourself believing it after watching the video above, also published by GQ, in which Scorsese himself discusses a selection of features from the past half-century of his career, the earliest of which, Mean Streets, was a breakout project for both its young director and even younger star, a certain Robert de Niro, in 1973.

Scorsese’s latest, Killers of the Flower Moon, opens next month as not just another of his many collaborations with de Niro, but the first Scorsese film to feature both de Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. “We were acquainted with each other when we were sixteen years old,” the director says of de Niro in the GQ video. “He experienced what I experienced growing up” in rough-and-tumble New York neighborhoods like Little Italy and the Bowery, and thus “knows who I am and where I came from.” Hence the trust with which Scorsese took de Niro’s recommendation of DiCaprio in the early nineties: “You gotta work with him someday.”

That someday came in 2002, with Gangs of New York, after which the Scorsese-diCaprio professional relationship would mature to bear additional cinematic fruit with projects like The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street. At this point it has become a parallel enterprise to Scorsese-de Niro, which can be traced from The Irishman, which came out in 2019, back through the likes of GoodFellas (though it stars the late Ray Liotta), Casino, The King of Comedy, and Raging Bull — a picture that, along with other brazenly ambitious United Artists releases like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Scorsese now sees as marking the end of “the power of the director.”

In “new Hollywood” era of the nineteen-seventies, Scorsese remembers, “things were wide open, and we went in and took it like the barbarians at the gate, and we transformed whatever we could, but they caught us.” Still, since then he’s “never stopped working for any noticeable amount of time,” as Baron puts it, though in recent years he’s been given to rueful comment about the artistic and economic dynamics of his industry and art form. As for the state of the world in general, he makes an equally grim diagnosis with reference to his and de Niro’s best-known collaboration, Taxi Driver: “Every other person is like Travis Bickle now.”

Related content:

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The Decay of Cinema: Susan Sontag, Martin Scorsese & Their Lamentations on the Decline of Cinema Explored in a New Video Essay

The Filmmaking of Martin Scorsese Demystified in 6 Video Essays

What Makes Taxi Driver So Powerful? An In-Depth Study of Martin Scorsese’s Existential Film on the Human Condition

Martin Scorsese Explains the Difference Between Cinema and Movies

Scorsese’s The Irishman in the Context of his Oeuvre – Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #29 Featuring Colin Marshall

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Stream Hundreds of Hours of Studio Ghibli Movie Music That Will Help You Study, Work, or Simply Relax: My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away & More

The Boy and the Heron, the latest feature from master animator Hayao Miyazaki, opened in Japan this past summer. In that it marks his latest emergence from his supposed “retirement,” we could label it not just as late Miyazaki, but perhaps even “post-late” Miyazaki. But the film nevertheless shares significant qualities with his earlier work, not least a score composed by Joe Hisaishi. Since Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind — which opened in 1984, even before the foundation of Studio Ghibli — Hisaishi’s music has done nearly as much to establish the sensibility of Miyazaki’s films as their lavish, imaginative animation, and you can stream hundreds of hours of it with this Youtube playlist.

Each of the playlist’s 121 two-hour videos offers musical selections from a mix of Ghibli movies, including Miyazaki favorites like My Neighbor Totoro, Porco Rosso, and Spirited Away, and also the works of other directors: Yoshifumi Kondō’s Whisper of the Heart, Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Arrietty,  Gorō Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill.

If you’ve seen those pictures, these quiet, often minimal renditions of their music will surely bring their animated fantasies right back to mind. Even if you haven’t, they can still fulfill the function promised by the videos’ titles of setting a mood conducive to study, work, or simple relaxation.

So beloved are Hisaishi’s scores, for Miyazaki and others (most notably comedian-auteur Takeshi Kitano), that it’s possible to know the music long before you’ve seen the movies. And even in performances considerably different from the versions heard on the actual soundtracks, they always sound immediately recognizable as Hisaishi’s work. Shaped by an eclectic set of influences (born Mamoru Fujisawa, he took on his professional name as an homage to Quincy Jones), he developed a compositional style neither strictly Eastern nor Western. The same can be said about Ghibli movies themselves, which often possess both fairy-tale European settings and Japanese philosophical underpinnings. Wherever you place yourself on the cultural map, you’d do well to make their music the soundtrack of your own life.

Related content:

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Hayao Miyazaki, The Mind of a Master: A Thoughtful Video Essay Reveals the Driving Forces Behind the Animator’s Incredible Body of Work

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The 50 Greatest Music Videos of All Time, Ranked by AV Club

It’s not an especially straightforward matter to pin down when music videos first emerged. In a sense, the Beatles were already making them back in the late sixties, but then, MTV, where the music video as we know it rapidly took shape, didn’t start broadcasting until 1981. The very first video aired on the channel, “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, had actually been made almost two years earlier, in 1979. But that didn’t stop it from doing a good deal to define the form that would, itself, define the popular culture of the eighties. Nor did it stop it from appearing, 40-odd years later, on The AV Club’s list of the 50 greatest music videos of all time. They’re viewable as a Youtube playlist here, or you can stream them all above.

Not that it ranks especially high. In fact, it comes in at number 50, leading into a selection of videos from artists popular in a range of subsequent periods: Talking Heads, George Michael, Nirvana, LL Cool J, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift. As the artistic ambitions of the music video grew, it reflected not just a song’s cultural moment, but put several such moments in play at once.

In Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot,” “a clip of Elvis Presley is followed by space-jazz pioneer Sun Ra; a snatch of underground comic book auteur Harvey Pekar on Late Night with David Letterman flits by.” For the “high water mark for kitschy 1990s irony” that is Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” “Spike Jonze sets the video in the 1950s… but it’s the ’50s as seen on Happy Days, a sitcom that painted a rosy picture of the Eisenhower years.”

Jonze also draws inspiration from seventies television for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” a tribute to the cop shows of that era that makes up for an apparent lack of budget with sheer humor and energy (a reminder of the director’s origin in skateboarding videos). I remember my millennial peers getting excited about that video in the 90s, as, in the 200s, they’d get excited about Michel Gondry’s all-LEGO animation of the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl.” This was roughly when Britney Spears was breaking through to superstardom, thanks not least to videos like “Baby One More Time,” which combines the slickness of teen pop with the chintz of teen life. “The idea for Britney’s iconic schoolgirl uniform and pigtails came from the singer herself: director Nigel Dick followed her lead, then had wardrobe buy every stitch of clothing in the video from Kmart.”

This was also before Youtube, whose ascent made the music video more viable than it had been in years. The AV Club’s list does include a few videos from the past decade and a half— Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” — but on the whole, it underscores that there’s never been another time like the eighties. That decade that went from “Ashes to Ashes” to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Relax,” “Money for Nothing,” “Walk This Way,”Take on Me,” and “Rhythm Nation” — to say nothing of institutions like Duran Duran, Madonna, and Michael Jackson, all of whom make the list more than once, but none of whom take its top spot. That goes to Peter Gabriel, whose stop-motion fantasia “Sledgehammer” is MTV’s all-time most-played music video. “If anyone wants to try and copy this video, good luck to them,” Gabriel once said. He meant its painstaking production, but he could just as easily have been talking about the place it attained in pop culture.

Related content:

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

A Playlist of 45 Shakespeare Film Trailers, from 1935 – 2021

The Internet Movie Database credits Shakespeare as the writer on 1787 films, 42 of which have yet to be released.

The Shakespeare Network has compiled a chronological playlist of trailers for 45 of them.

First up is 1935’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring Olivia de Havilland, Jimmy Cagney, Dick Powell, and, in the role of Puck, a 15-year-old Mickey Rooney, hailed by the New York Times as “one of the major delights” of the film, and Variety as “so intent on being cute that he becomes almost annoying.”

Tragedies dominate, with no fewer than six Hamlets, Shakespeare’s most filmed work, and “one of the most fascinating and most thankless tasks in show business” according to novelist and frequent film critic James Agee:

There can never be a definitive production of a play about which no two people in the world can agree. There can never be a thoroughly satisfying production of a play about which so many people feel so personally and so passionately. Very likely there will never be a production good enough to provoke less argument than praise.

Lawrence Olivier, Nicol Williamson, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, Ethan Hawke, David Tennant – take your pick:

MacBeth, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest – a comedy – are other crowd-pleasing workhorses, chewy assignments for actors and directors alike.

Those with a taste for deeper cuts will appreciate the inclusion of Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus (2011), Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) and Titus, Julie Taymor’s 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare’s most shocking bloodbath.

Moviegoing connoisseurs of the Bard may feel moved to stump for films that didn’t make the playlist. If you can find a trailer for it, go for it!  Lobby the Shakespeare Network on its behalf, or make your case in the comments.

We’ll throw our weight behind Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline, featuring Ed Harris roaring down the porch steps of a dilapidated Brooklyn Victorian on a motorcycle, the bizarre Romeo.Juliet pairing A-list British vocal talent with an all-feline line-up of Capulets and Montagues, and Shakespeare Behind Bars, a 2005 documentary following twenty incarcerated men who spent nine months delving into The Tempest prior to a production for guards, fellow inmates, and invited guests.

Enjoy the complete playlist of Shakespeare film trailers below. They move from 1935 to 2021.

Related Content 

Watch Very First Film Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Plays: King John, The Tempest, Richard III & More (1899-1936)

Young Orson Welles Directs “Voodoo Macbeth,” the First Shakespeare Production With An All-Black Cast: Footage from 1936

Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

All This and World War II: The Forgotten 1976 Film That Mashed Up WWII Film Clips & Beatles Covers by Peter Gabriel, Elton John, Keith Moon & More

You may not hear the term mash-up very often these days, but the concept itself isn’t exactly the early-two-thousands fad that it might imply. It seems that, as soon as technology made it possible for enthusiasts to combine ostensibly unrelated pieces of media — the more incongruous, the better — they started doing so: take the synchronization of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, known as The Dark Side of the Rainbow. But even back in the seventies, the art of the proto-mash-up wasn’t practiced only by rogue projectionists in altered states of mind, as evidenced by the 1976 20th Century Fox Release All This and World War II, which assembled real and dramatized footage of that epoch-making geopolitical conflict with Beatles covers.

Upon its release, All This and World War II “was received so harshly it was pulled from theaters after two weeks and never spoken of again,” as Keith Phipps writes at The Reveal.

Those who actually seek it out and watch it today will find that it gets off to an even less auspicious start than they might imagine: “A clip of Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) skeptically receiving the news of Neville Chamberlain’s ‘peace in our time’ declaration in the 1939 film City in Darkness gives way to a cover of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ by ’70s soft-rock giants Ambrosia. Accompanying the song: footage of swastika banners, German soldiers marching in formation, and a climactic appearance from a smiling Adolf Hitler, by implication the organizer of the ‘mystery tour’ that was World War II.”

The other recording artists of the seventies enlisted to supply new versions of well-known Beatles numbers include the Bee Gees, Elton John, the Who’s Keith Moon, and Peter Gabriel, names that assured the soundtrack album (which you can hear on this Youtube playlist) a much greater success than the film itself, with its fever-dream mixture of newsreels Axis and Allied with 20th Century Fox war-picture clips.

As for what everyone involved was thinking in the first place, Phipps quotes an explanation that soundtrack producer Lou Reizner once provided to UPI: “It would have been easy to take the music of the era and dub it to match the action on screen. But we’d have lost the young audience. We want all age groups to see this picture because we think it makes a statement about the absurdity of war. It is the definitive anti-war film” — or, as Phipps puts it, the definitive “cult film in search of cult.”

via Metafilter

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

A Mesmerizing Music Video for Brian Eno’s “Emerald and Stone” Made with Paint, Soap & Water

Brian Eno turned 75 years old this past spring, but if he has any thoughts of retirement, they haven’t slowed his creation of new art and music. Just last year he put out his latest solo album FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, videos from whose songs we featured here on Open Culture. However compelling the official material released by Eno, the bodies of fan-made work it tends to inspire also merits exploration. Take French visual artist Thomas Blanchard’s short film “Emerald and Stone” above, which visualizes the eponymous track from Eno’s 2010 album Small Craft on a Milk Sea, a collaboration with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams.

“Emerald and Stone,” which you’ll want to watch in full-screen mode, consists entirely of “riveting imagery built from a simple concoction of paint, soap and water.” So says Aeon, in praise of the film’s “ephemeral dreamworld of flowing music and visuals that’s easy to sink into.”

Its drifting, glittering bubbles have a planetary look, contributing to a visual aesthetic that suits the sonic one. Like many of the other compositions on Small Craft on a Milk Sea, “Emerald and Stone” will sound on some level familiar to listeners who only know Eno’s earlier work developing the genre of ambient music in the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

That same era witnessed — or rather, heard — the rise of “new age” music, which played up its associations with outer space, seas of tranquility, the movement of the heavenly bodies, and so on. Eno’s work was, at least in this particular sense, somewhat more down-to-earth: he called his breakout ambient album Music for Airports, after all, having created it with those utilitarian spaces in mind. Appropriately enough, Blanchard’s short for “Emerald and Stone” evokes the cosmos without departing from the fine grain of our own world, and appears abstract while having been made wholly from everyday materials. Eno himself would surely approve, having premised his own on not escaping reality, but placing it in a more interesting context.

via Aeon

Related content:

The Brian Eno Discography: Stream 29 Hours of Recordings by the Master of Ambient Music

Watch Videos for 10 Songs on Brian Eno’s Brand New Album, FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE

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Brian Eno Explains the Origins of Ambient Music

Watch Brian Eno’s Experimental Film “The Ship,” Made with Artificial Intelligence

Brian Eno on the Loss of Humanity in Modern Music

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Strict Rules for Watching Psycho in Theaters (1960)

Psycho, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic films, didn’t come together very easily. Hitchcock’s studio, Paramount Pictures, didn’t like anything about the film and denied him a proper budget. So the director went solo and funded the film through his television company Shamley Productions. The budget was tight — less than $1,000,000. Costs were firmly controlled. Hence why, in 1960, the film was shot in black and white.

When Psycho hit theaters, Hitchcock controlled the promotion. The stars — Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh — didn’t make the usual rounds in the media. Critics weren’t given private screenings. And Hitchcock created buzz for the film when he exerted directorial control over the viewing experience of the audience. Showings of the film began on a tightly-controlled schedule in theaters in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. And a firm “no late admission” policy was put in place. You either saw the film from the very beginning, or you didn’t see it all. Signs appeared in front of cinemas reading:

We won’t allow you to cheat yourself. You must see PSYCHO from the very beginning. Therefore, do not expect to be admitted into the theatre after the start of each performance of the picture. We say no one — and we mean no one — not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States, or the Queen of England (God bless her)!

Theater managers initially balked at the idea, fearing financial losses. But Hitchcock had his way. And he was right. Long lines formed outside the theaters. Psycho enjoyed critical and commercial success, so much so the film was re-released in 1965.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

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Watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with a Modern, New Electronic Soundtrack (1927)

From sound artist Tomer Baruch and drummer Alex Brajković comes a new electronic soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s century-old classic film, Metropolis. The new score comes with this preface:

One of the most significant themes in the dystopian feature is the blurred-to-nonexistent line separating man and machine; Human-like machines, Mechanical-humans, real-life android deepfakes, and above all the city of Metropolis, an enormous machine and within it men, slaved to maintain its operation. The theme that was disturbing in the beginning of the 20th century is as relevant as ever with the latest developments in AI, forcing us to rethink again what makes us human.

In analogy to that the soundtrack is based on archive recordings of early 20th century machinery, on top of which Tomer Baruch and Alex Brajkovic play analog synthesizers and drums. They interface with the machines and embody a relentlessly repetitive mechanical motion, one which is usually sequenced or programmed. By creating music which is in itself blurring the line between man and machine, by subjecting themselves to machine-like patterns, the musicians become a part of Metropolis, creating a disillusioned, intensified and darker than ever soundtrack for the film.

Baruch and Alex Brajković created the soundtrack for the Sounds of Silence Film Festival, Den Haag in 2019. Stream it above.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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