Power and the Look: Casino

Abstract

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is a three-part, 224-minute television documentary that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1995. Co-scripted and co-directed by Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, it was produced by Florence Dauman for the British Film Institute and the British television company Channel 4. The documentary, which was largely produced in 1994, and cost $750,000, consists of narration spoken by Scorsese direct to camera and as voice-over introducing, discussing and contextualizing an array of extracts from almost exclusively American films from the silent period on.¹ In part, the documentary, during which Scorsese addresses the ‘need to look at old movies’, accords with the educative impulse implicit in his concern with film preservation, which saw Scorsese in March 1995 lobby Washington on behalf of two acts protective of filmmakers’ rights (Warn 1995). A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies besides invites consideration with respect to Scorsese’s own figure and career. If the underlining of the words ‘Personal Journey’ during the front credits flags Scorsese’s authorial star image, then the documentary’s prime organizing principle, introduced early on, and termed ‘The Director’s Dilemma’, reflects upon his often contingent institutional status — what it takes ‘to be a filmmaker in Hollywood’, how one survives the ‘tug-of-war between personal expression and commercial imperatives’.