Scorsese and Documentary: The Last Waltz

Abstract

Writing in Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1950s, Jean-Luc Godard asserted: ‘All great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend towards fiction’ (1959: 132). Consistent with the before-the-fact, critical self-justification familiar to the nouvelle vague, it is an assertion that obtains filmic embodiment in the combination of documentary and fiction, realism and stylization that, as it acknowledges mutually film’s ‘objective’ recording function and its ‘subjective’ manipulability, is one of the movement’s defining elements. Nevertheless, given the nouvelle vague preponderantly comprises fictional narratives, and the movement’s modernist imperative, its films accentuate the ‘subjective’ rather than the ‘objective’, the reality, once more to evoke Godard, of the representation as much as and more than the reality represented.¹