How does Mar­tin Scors­ese direct a movie? Younger film­mak­ers have been study­ing at his feet try­ing to fig­ure that out for more than four decades. Now in his late 70s and boast­ing a name that has long since become a byword for the Amer­i­can auteur, Scors­ese con­tin­ues to direct a major fea­ture (along­side almost equal­ly numer­ous doc­u­men­taries and shorts) at a much younger film­mak­er’s pace. This year saw the release of The Irish­man, the lat­est chap­ter in Scors­ese’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with Robert De Niro that began back in 1973 with Mean Streets. This ambi­tious new film has prompt­ed Scors­ese fans to look back at the direc­tor’s career, trac­ing the lines that run through his both vig­or­ous­ly enter­tain­ing and high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic body of work.

Stu­dio Binder, whose primers on the direct­ing styles of Quentin Taran­ti­no and Wes Ander­son we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, has pro­duced a thor­ough break­down of what makes a Mar­tin Scors­ese Pic­ture — as their open­ing titles have announced since Rag­ing Bull — a Mar­tin Scors­ese Pic­ture.

In a break­down of Scors­ese’s tech­niques, film­mak­er SC Lan­nom high­lights how he builds flawed char­ac­ters, links cam­era move­ment to emo­tion, makes ener­getic edit­ing deci­sions (in col­lab­o­ra­tion with his long­time edi­tor Thel­ma Schoon­mak­er), uses char­ac­ter-dri­ven cam­era place­ment, builds “authen­tic and edu­ca­tion­al worlds,” com­pos­es movies to the music he has in mind, pairs mon­tages with voiceovers, and makes use of “extreme sound design.”

Of course, none of these descrip­tions con­vey the vis­cer­al impact of Scors­ese’s films at their best. You can get a taste of that in the Stu­dio Binder “Direc­tor’s Chair” video on Scors­ese at the top of the post, which assem­bles exam­ples of how he uses his roots in Ital­ian New York, cre­ates char­ac­ters on the edge (Taxi Dri­ver’s Travis Bick­le being per­haps the pro­to­type), builds “authen­tic worlds,” and keeps both the music and the edit in mind while direct­ing. These meth­ods are most clear­ly appar­ent in his hit “gang­ster movies” like Good­Fel­las, Casi­no, and The Depart­ed, but oth­er milieux — the time and place of pro­fes­sion­al box­ing, of Jesuit priests in 17th-cen­tu­ry Japan, of crooked 1990s stock­bro­kers, of Jesus Christ — have also proven amenable to the Scors­ese treat­ment.

Scors­ese’s faith­ful­ness to the real world, or at least the real world as he sees and feels it, is exceed­ed only by his faith­ful­ness to the world of cin­e­ma. While he usu­al­ly deals with real­is­tic sub­ject mat­ter, he does so with every trick in the styl­is­tic book: not just musi­cal mon­tages but sequences of slow and fast motion, freeze-frames, and zooms all meant to bring you, the view­er, into the emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence of his char­ac­ters. “Scors­ese knows how he wants you to feel, and he is a ‘dirty fight­er’ of cin­e­ma who will pull out all the tricks to get you feel­ing that way,” writes Lan­nom. “The dif­fer­ence between him and say, Michael Bay, is that Scorsese’s sto­ries, mes­sages, and gen­er­al approach is much more mature.” Indeed, Scors­ese can some­times seem to be one of the last grown-ups in Hol­ly­wood, but one whose love of cin­e­ma burns as intense­ly as it did in child­hood. For that rea­son, a new Scors­ese movie — rather, a new Mar­tin Scors­ese Pic­ture — will always be an event.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies

11-Year-Old Mar­tin Scors­ese Draws Sto­ry­boards for His Imag­ined Roman Epic Film, The Eter­nal City

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Can we run a line of influ­ence from the Incred­i­ble Hulk back through Super­man all the way to…Koko the Clown? If we’re talk­ing about roto­scop­ing we are.

Vox has returned with anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing mini-doc in their “Hollywouldn’t” series, explor­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary film inven­tions cre­at­ed out­side the main stu­dio sys­tem.

If you don’t know roto­scop­ing as a word, you’ve no doubt seen it: essen­tial­ly it is a way for ani­ma­tors to cre­ate more real­is­tic move­ment by trac­ing over live action, one frame at a time.

The man who invent­ed it was Max Fleis­ch­er, who also cre­at­ed Bet­ty Boop and ani­mat­ed Segar’s Pop­eye and Super­man. As the Vox doc shows, Fleis­ch­er saw that ear­ly ani­ma­tion was stiff and lack­ing in real­ism, and so he invent­ed a device to project a live action frame of film onto the back of a glass draw­ing board so a fig­ure could be traced. With his broth­er Dave dressed up and filmed as Koko the Clown, Fleis­ch­er was able to bring an uncan­ny real­ism to his “Out of the Inkwell” car­toons, as Koko moved just like a human (when he need­ed to do so), a feat that attract­ed the atten­tion of the New York Times and oth­ers.

Fleis­ch­er was con­stant­ly push­ing the tech­nique. Not sat­is­fied with real­ism, he used footage of singer/band leader Cab Cal­loway and turned him into a danc­ing wal­rus. What­ev­er the trans­for­ma­tion, Calloway’s moon­walk­ing, slinky gate is main­tained, and the Bet­ty Boop car­toon from which it hails, “Min­nie the Moocher,” along with its sequel “Snow White,” are two of the weird­est, spook­i­est bits of ani­ma­tion out there still to this day.

You can see more roto­scop­ing in the sub­se­quent col­or “Super­man” car­toons and the real­is­tic Gulliver’s Trav­els, which would go on to bank­rupt the stu­dio.

Dis­ney would use roto­scop­ing in Snow White and the Sev­en Dwarves and all sub­se­quent Dis­ney princess­es of the clas­sic era were ani­mat­ed in part from live action sources.

Exper­i­men­tal ani­ma­tors used roto­scop­ing to all dif­fer­ent effects, not always want­i­ng to attempt real­ism. Ralph Bak­shi used some very odd roto­scop­ing in sec­tions of his ani­mat­ed Lord of the Rings fea­ture and Amer­i­can Pop, and strange­ly, as he got clos­er to real­ism, the fak­er and more lethar­gic it looked. Once com­put­er graph­ics entered the pic­ture, roto­scop­ing took a back seat, but motion cap­ture is a three-dimen­sion­al ver­sion of the con­cept, essen­tial­ly over­lay­ing com­put­er ani­ma­tion on a filmed actor.

How­ev­er, a form of roto­scop­ing can be seen in Richard Linklater’s Wak­ing Life and A Scan­ner Dark­ly, where, assist­ed by com­put­ers to do most of the hard work, it was chris­tened Roto­shop by ani­ma­tor and MIT sci­en­tist Bob Sabis­ton.

And to bring it all back home to your pock­et, the video fil­ters on your phone that can turn your face into a dog or a wiz­ard or a glam­or model…that all start­ed just over a cen­tu­ry ago by one plucky inven­tor and his broth­er, dressed as a clown.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Orig­i­nal 1940s Super­man Car­toon: Watch 17 Clas­sic Episodes Free Online

The Harlem Jazz Singer Who Inspired Bet­ty Boop: Meet the Orig­i­nal Boop-Oop-a-Doop, “Baby Esther”

Why Car­toon Char­ac­ters Wear Gloves: A Curi­ous Trip Through the His­to­ry of Ani­ma­tion

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

Tom Waits For No One: Watch the Pio­neer­ing Ani­mat­ed Tom Waits Music Video from 1979

Free Ani­mat­ed Films: From Clas­sic to Mod­ern

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

I don’t know about you, but my YouTube algo­rithms can act like a nag­ging friend, sug­gest­ing a video for days until I final­ly give in. Such was the case with this video essay with the tan­ta­liz­ing title: “Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Real­ly)”.

First of all, before, dur­ing, and after 2017’s Twin Peaks The Return, the­o­ries were as inescapable as the cat memes on the Twin Peaks Face­book groups. After the mind­blow­ing Episode 8, they went into over­drive, includ­ing the bonkers idea that the final two episodes were meant to be watched *over­layed* on each oth­er. And I high­light­ed one in depth jour­ney through the entire three decades of the Lynch/Frost cul­tur­al event for this very site.

So when I final­ly clicked on the link I balked imme­di­ate­ly: Four and a half hours? Are you kid­ding me? (You might be say­ing the very thing to your­self now.) But just like the nar­ra­tor says, bear with me. Over the week, I watched the entire thing in 30 minute seg­ments, not because it was gru­el­ing, but because time is pre­cious and there is a lot to chew over. By the end I was rec­om­mend­ing the video to friends only to find some of them were already deep inside Twin Perfect’s analy­sis.

So here we are, with me high­ly encour­ag­ing you to invest the time (pro­vid­ing you have watched all three sea­sons of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me), but also not want­i­ng to ruin some of Twin Perfect’s the­o­ries, which he lays out like a pros­e­cu­tor, walk­ing us through a gen­er­al the­o­ry of Lynch.

How­ev­er, I will make a few points:

• Just last week we post­ed a video in which Lynch explains both the Uni­fied Field The­o­ry and Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion. There are at least two major sequences that Twin Per­fect sug­gests reflects the Uni­fied Field.
• Lynch’s obses­sion with elec­tric­i­ty and fire are both essen­tial to the the­o­ry.
• The One-Armed Man’s quote “I mean it as it is, as it sounds,” dou­bles as Lynch’s approach: Twin Per­fect does a mas­ter­ful job show­ing many, many exam­ples where Lynch is direct­ly explain­ing his use of metaphor and sym­bol to us. Some­times that is straight into the cam­era.
• We now know why Sea­son Three fea­tured a three minute shot of a man sweep­ing up peanuts from a bar floor.
• I’ve always felt that The Return was an explo­ration of the dan­gers of nos­tal­gia, and this essay con­firmed it for me. There was some­thing miss­ing at the cen­ter of the Third Sea­son, indeed.
• Twin Per­fect reads all quotes from the direc­tor in a mock-Lynch voice. For some this will grate; for me it was A BEAUTIFUL THING (wig­gly fin­ger ges­ture).

Twin Per­fect put much more effort into this than most grad­u­ate stu­dents:

I have been work­ing on this video for two years, writ­ing and research­ing and edit­ing. I’ve been read­ing and watch­ing and lis­ten­ing to every cre­ator inter­view and AMA, every DVD extra and fea­turette, every TV spe­cial, every fan the­o­ry, blog, and pod­cast — any and all Twin Peaks-relat­ed posts I could find — try­ing to hone and pol­ish my script to be the best I thought it could pos­si­bly be. I focus-grouped my video with peo­ple, chal­leng­ing them to poke as many holes in my argu­ments as they could so that I could bet­ter illus­trate my ideas. I tried my best to cre­ate some­thing oth­ers would find of val­ue, some­thing that would add to the ongo­ing mys­tery and spark new dis­cus­sions about my favorite series.

Are there some prob­lems with the the­o­ry? Sure. But for every “I don’t know, man,” I said to myself, he imme­di­ate­ly fol­lowed it up with some­thing spot on. I think he deserves that MFA in Twin Peaks Stud­ies.

So brew up some strong cof­fee and cut your­self a slice of cher­ry pie, and get stuck in.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Twin Peaks Visu­al Sound­track Released Only in Japan: A New Way to Expe­ri­ence David Lynch’s Clas­sic Show

David Bowie’s Mys­ti­cal Appear­ances in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

An insane con­quis­ta­dor, a dwarf rebel­lion, cat­tle auc­tion­eers, ancient cave paint­ings, flam­ing oil rigs, tel­e­van­ge­lism, ski jump­ing, strong­men, Nico­las Cage: at first glance, the fil­mog­ra­phy of Wern­er Her­zog may seem will­ful­ly bizarre. A clos­er look, which reveals his films’ unusu­al mix­ture of fact and fic­tion deliv­ered through images that lodge per­ma­nent­ly in the sub­con­scious, may not dis­pel that impres­sion. But the pro­lif­ic Her­zog, who has steadi­ly worked in and ever more idio­syn­crat­i­cal­ly defined his own realm of cin­e­ma since mak­ing his first short Her­ak­les 57 years ago, is engaged in a con­sis­tent ven­ture — or so argues Tom van der Lin­den in his video essay “The Inner Chron­i­cle of What We Are: Under­stand­ing Wern­er Her­zog.”

“I have always thought of my films as being one big work,” Van der Lin­den quotes Her­zog him­self as say­ing. “The char­ac­ters in this sto­ry are all des­per­ate and soli­tary rebels with no lan­guage with which to com­mu­ni­cate. Inevitably, they suf­fer because of this. They know their rebel­lion is doomed to fail­ure, but they con­tin­ue with­out respite, wound­ed, strug­gling on their own with­out assis­tance.” Van der Lin­den iden­ti­fies that strug­gle as much in Her­zog’s askew dra­ma­tized vision of Kas­par Hauser, the 19th-cen­tu­ry youth who claimed to have grown up in total iso­la­tion, as he does in Land of Silence and Dark­ness, Her­zog’s doc­u­men­tary about the blind-deaf Fini Straub­inger. In Her­zog’s film, such char­ac­ters are not out­siders but “saints, embod­i­ments of the human spir­it that exists with­in each and every one of us, long­ing to man­i­fest itself.”

But then, every Her­zog fan knows how lit­tle sense it makes to draw a line between the “fic­tion” and the “non­fic­tion” in his work. “As well known as Her­zog is for bring­ing real­i­ty into his fic­tion­al films, just as well known is he for bring­ing his fic­tion into his doc­u­men­taries,” says Van der Lin­den, an imper­a­tive that has entailed “unortho­dox direc­to­r­i­al deci­sions.” These include putting near­ly an entire cast of Heart of Glass under hyp­no­sis, releas­ing 11,000 rats into a city for his remake of Nos­fer­atu, and most famous­ly, for Fitz­car­ral­do, a film about a rub­ber baron who drags a steamship over a hill in Peru, drag­ging a real steamship over a real hill in Peru — a sin­gu­lar cin­e­mat­ic effort that inspired a doc­u­men­tary of its own, Les Blank’s Bur­den of Dreams.

“My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well,” Her­zog says to Blank, “and the only dis­tinc­tion between me and you is that I can artic­u­late them, and that is what poet­ry or paint­ing or lit­er­a­ture of film­mak­ing is all about.” On some lev­el, Her­zog’s inter­est in dreams still explains the nature of his film­mak­ing. This man­i­fests espe­cial­ly in his doc­u­men­taries, says van der Lin­den, where he “always seems to wan­der off the actu­al sub­ject by includ­ing a vari­ety of seem­ing­ly ran­dom sto­ries from the peo­ple he encoun­ters. He’s not inter­est­ed in their facts; he’s inter­est­ed in their dreams.” Like no oth­er film­mak­er work­ing today, Her­zog artic­u­lates the kind of truth we feel in our own dreams as well: the “poet­ic, ecsta­t­ic truth” he spoke of in his “Min­neso­ta Dec­la­ra­tion,” which “can be reached only through fab­ri­ca­tion and imag­i­na­tion and styl­iza­tion.” No won­der he’s ded­i­cat­ed him­self to cin­e­ma, still the most dream­like medi­um of them all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Wern­er Herzog’s Very First Film, Her­ak­les, Made When He Was Only 19 Years Old (1962)

Wern­er Her­zog Cre­ates Required Read­ing & Movie View­ing Lists for Enrolling in His Film School

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

To Make Great Films, You Must Read, Read, Read and Write, Write, Write, Say Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wern­er Her­zog

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hav­ing moved to Korea a cou­ple weeks ago, I won’t have the chance to par­take this year in the beloved insti­tu­tion of Amer­i­can cul­ture known as Thanks­giv­ing. (Korea has its own Thanks­giv­ing, but it hap­pened two months ago.) Maybe you live in the Unit­ed States and thus almost cer­tain­ly have a Thanks­giv­ing din­ner of some kind, big or small, com­ing soon. Or maybe you, like me, live else­where in the world, and thus in a place with­out the same tra­di­tion. Either way, you can sure­ly par­take this Thanks­giv­ing in the beloved insti­tu­tion of Amer­i­can cul­ture known as the work of William S. Bur­roughs.

Here we have a short film of Bur­roughs, best known as the author of a body of con­tro­ver­sial and exper­i­men­tal lit­er­a­ture, includ­ing books like Junky and Naked Lunch, shot by Gus Van Sant, best known as the direc­tor of films like Good Will Hunt­ing, My Own Pri­vate Ida­ho, and Drug­store Cow­boy, the last of which includes a mem­o­rable appear­ance by Bur­roughs him­self.

It cap­tures Bur­roughs read­ing his poem “Thanks­giv­ing Day, Nov. 28, 1986,” also known as his “Thanks­giv­ing Prayer.” Van Sant shot it two Thanks­giv­ings after that one, in 1988, the year before Drug­store Cow­boy (and six years after adapt­ing Bur­rough’s sto­ry “The Dis­ci­pline of D.E.” into an ear­ly short film).

Bur­roughs, a life­long crit­ic of Amer­i­ca, fills his prayer with bit­ter­ly sar­cas­tic “thanks” for things like “a con­ti­nent to despoil and poi­son,” “Indi­ans to pro­vide a mod­icum of chal­lenge and dan­ger,” “the KKK,” and “Pro­hi­bi­tion and the war against drugs” (about which his char­ac­ter in Drug­store Cow­boy had some par­tic­u­lar­ly choice words). He ends by express­ing iron­ic, Great Gats­by-quot­ing grat­i­tude for “the last and great­est betray­al of the last and great­est of human dreams.”

Like him — like most every­body — I have my own, if less deep-seat­ed, frus­tra­tions with our home­land, and per­haps in leav­ing I sub­con­scious­ly emu­lat­ed his stretch­es of expa­tri­atism in Mex­i­co, Eng­land, France, and Moroc­co. But I sin­cere­ly doubt that I’ve had my last Thanks­giv­ing on U.S. soil; for all its fail­ings, Amer­i­ca remains too inter­est­ing to stay away from entire­ly. After all, what oth­er coun­try could pos­si­bly pro­duce a writer, a per­son­al­i­ty, or a crit­ic like William S. Bur­roughs?

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

The Mak­ing of Drug­store Cow­boy, Gus Van Sant’s First Major Film (1989)

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

The Dis­ci­pline of D.E.: Gus Van Sant Adapts a Sto­ry by William S. Bur­roughs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.