A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is a documentary film of 225 minutes in length, presented by Martin Scorsese and produced by the British Film Institute.
In the film Martin Scorsese examines a selection of his favorite American films grouped according to three different types of directors: the director as an illusionist: D.W. Griffith or F. W. Murnau, who created new editing techniques among other innovations that made the appearance of sound and color possible later on, the director as a smuggler - filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller, and Vincente Minnelli, who used to hide subversive messages in their films and the director as an iconoclast, those filmmakers attacking social conventionalism — Charles Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Sam Peckinpah.
The documentary is structured in segments:
- Part I
- The director's dilemma
- The director as storyteller
- The Western
- The Gangster film
- The Musical
- Part II
- The director as illusionist
- The director as smuggler I
- Part III
- The director as smuggler II
- The director as iconoclast
It was originally shown in three parts on Channel 4 in the UK in 1995.
Read more about A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies: Films Mentioned
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