Teaching Filmmaking - 1970 WNYC Interview with Martin Scorsese (Age 27) Discussing Alternatives to Hollywood Bloat and How To Guide Young Filmmakers



Before the release of Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and The Last Waltz (1978), here's a young filmmaker and teacher at NYU - Martin Scorsese - talking about how "new developments in equipment" were making possible a new kind of filmmaking that offered a more "immediate means of expression."

40+ years later, listening to a young Scorsese talk as a teacher about how inexpensive and more mobile tools might free up filmmakers to make alternatives to Hollywood epics, it's hard not to think about his early work and his more recent Hollywood films...

In retrospect, Martin Scorsese wasn't saying much that was new or revolutionary in 1970. In its first 75 years (the Lumieres first projected their films in Paris in 1895), filmmaking had already survived numerous revolutionary changes by 1970.

So Martin Scorsese's mild 1970 attack on the bourgeois entertainments coming out of Hollywood  - films made with scarce and expensive means of production that adhered tightly to yesterday's conventions - and his support for the new generation - young filmmakers who followed new processes of creation and used new tools to make work in rule-breaking ways... was not really shocking.

What is shocking is to consider that in 2013 Martin Scorsese is now 70 - and that he's been making films for over 1/3 of the entire history of filmmaking - and that his role has changed from challenging and undermining a system built on wealth, possessions and respectable behavior - to being a paragon of that Old Guard.

Of special interesest to film teachers, is what the young Martin Scorsese  has to say about teaching filmmaking...

Thanks to Ian Ginn for the link.

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