American film director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Irishman; founder of the Film Foundation, which restores and preserves films.
8 things
The Red ShoesOtherMichael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
loved
What is it that’s so special about The Red Shoes? Of course, it’s beautiful, one of the most beautiful Technicolor films ever made; it has such an extraordinary sense of magic—look again at the scene where Moira Shearer is walking up the steps to Anton Walbrook’s villa, especially in the new restoration: it seems like she’s floating on currents of sparkling light and air.
Criterion Collection Top 10 list by Martin Scorsese, the entry for The Red Shoes.
I love all three of these pictures and many other Mizoguchi films as well (including Princess Yang Kwei-fei, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, and Miss Oyu, to name only a few), but Ugetsu has the most powerful effect on me.
Criterion Collection Top 10 list by Martin Scorsese, the entry for Ugetsu.
I saw Ashes and Diamonds for the first time in 1961. And even back then, during that period when we expected to be astonished at the movies, when things were happening all over the world, it shocked me.
Criterion Collection Top 10 list by Martin Scorsese, the entry for Ashes and Diamonds.
I realize that L’avventura is supposed to be about characters who are “alienated” from their surroundings, but that word has been used so often to describe this film and Antonioni’s films in general that it more or less shuts down thought. In fact, I see it, more than ever, as a movie about people in spiritual distress: their spiritual signals are disrupted, which is why they see the world around them as hostile and unforgiving. Visually, sensually, thematically, dramatically, in every way, it’s one of the great works of cinema.
Criterion Collection Top 10 list by Martin Scorsese, the entry for L’avventura.
8½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways—the freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions (another great black-and-white film: every image gleams like a pearl—again, shot by Gianni Di Venanzo).
Criterion Collection Top 10 list by Martin Scorsese, the entry for 8½.
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