Lost Innocence

God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master. (Aeschylus, Agamemnon - the Browning version)


Reading a post recently on the Criterion web page devoted to Martin Scorsese, who just turned 77, I stumbled at the headline: "Wishing a very happy birthday to the incomparable Martin Scorsese! Here he is with Kent Jones in conversation about his 1993 romantic masterpiece THE AGE OF INNOCENCE." With all the deference I could summon on the occasion of the birthday of an old American filmmaker who has spent much of his life risking a great deal more than his vanity on projects that were guaranteed to fail, I cannot see how on earth anyone with any critical acumen could think that The Age of Innocence was a masterpiece, let alone a romantic one. I accept the fact that even Criterion, an enterprise devoted to the discovery, preservation and/or restoration of examples of film art from far and wide does so for profit and that not every film they submit to the Criterion Treatment is going to meet my own exacting standard of worthiness (looking through their catalog provides me with equal amounts of pleasure and pain). But The Age of Innocence? A film that, if he is as honest as I expect he is, even Scorsese should look back on with mixed emotions. And even after considering that he only remade Cape Fear to please his producers long enough to persuade them to let him make The Age of Innocence, it was a misstep for Scorsese - honorable and laudable for a filmmaker who was eminently entitled to a misstep.

Even if I were to accept that, at the age of 77, Scorsese is deserving of the title of Master filmmaker (how many former masters have there been? Scorsese is eager to inform us of his own choices for the title), that doesn't mean that every film he made is a masterpiece. I would be happy to argue that about 90% are not masterpieces, and had I the time and the inclination I could demonstrate why. But the problem has nothing to do with the application of critical standards. It's about the limitations of scholarship and how some of the greatest film scholars make the lousiest film critics. The two disciplines can rarely even touch each other, for quite basic and important reasons. Film scholarship and film criticism are distinct - and sometimes antithetical - pursuits. In the film Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois, Langlois himself stated:

Since like everybody else, I was full of silly prejudices I missed out on incredible things. Salome with Theda Bara was for sale. I thought, 'Fox, Theda Bara, American spectacle...who needs it?' Now the film is lost forever. It was probably quite good. From that point on, through trial and error, I saw that people, intent on triage, who think they have taste, me included, are idiots. One must save everything and buy everything. Never assume you know what's of value.

So, the moment that Langlois made a value judgement on material that he had the power to preserve or to consign to oblivion, he made an enormous mistake. Thanks to the efforts of archivists like Langlois and to scholars like Kevin Brownlow, whose magnificent books beginning with The Parade's Gone By, the idea that films of the past are deserving of preservation is popularly accepted. But film scholarship, which is the dedicated study of the who, what, when and where of films, has the responsibility to tell us everything we might need to know about any given film except the success or failure of its design. If it was intended to entertain, does it stand or fall? And if it was reaching for something higher, for art, for instance, does it make it or fall short?

A perfect demonstration of the difference in disciplines came about with the publication in 1966 of Donald Richie's landmark book, The Films of Akira Kurosawa. In his review of the book, Dwight Macdonald wrote of Richie:

His book on Kurosawa is comparable in scholarship, mastery of detail, interpretation and good writing to Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce. I don't know any other study of a director's work that approaches its scope and intelligence ... He goes into technique so extensively that I should think the book would be useful as a practical exposition of film-making regardless of one's special interest in Kurosawa.

But this impressive praise (with which I wholly agree) is followed by the point Macdonald was getting to and where Richie's book comes up conspicuously lacking:

A masterpiece of scholarship, but not of criticism. Perhaps the very qualities that make it the former prevent it from being the latter ... There is almost no qualitative discrimination between the twenty-three films: all of them are valued on the same (high) level, which is untrue to life, artists being men, not gods, and therefore fallible.

But how was Richie going to attract interest to an all-too-human artist who reached his peak in 1954 with Seven Samurai, and then rode his roller coaster slowly - if circuitously - back down to earth?

Looking over the films of Scorsese's that I have seen, there is a clear distinction that can be made between those that succeeded in realizing the filmmaker's intentions simply by being coherent and resonant as statements, regardless of the relevance of the points he was trying to make, and the others that were made to satisfy one producer or another. At some point in the 1980s, Scorsese attained a mastery of technique that made it possible for him to say and do whatever he wanted with the medium. It's easy to distinguish his commercial work from his personal work. In the latter category you can find Mean Streets (1973), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), Gangs of New York (1992), and Silence (2016). Each of these films is intense in a way that most of Scorsese's films are - intensely conceived (at least in visual terms), intensely executed, and intensely framed into a whole. But even here, with his most personal, most individualistic works, problems arose, on every occasion, in the writing stages of each film. I have always had the conviction that Scorsese is a filmmaker most completely at odds with the commercial constraints of American film, but that he is happy to be known as an American filmmaker - partly because of his reverence for a tradition that I don't believe exists in American film. Had Scorsese been making films in Italy, like the filmmakers Rossellini and Visconti, whose work he most reveres, we would certainly have had a greater appreciation of his formidable abilities and have been spared unnecessary work like Cape Fear, Casino, and the films of his deplorable DiCaprio phase, like Shutter Island. Stanley Kauffmann wrote of Scorsese that "patently his films are the work of a man who lives in cinema as a bird lives in the sky. He has invested himself with the history of the art in a way that empowers him without making him an imitator." His work is, I think, the most telling chronicle of the extreme difficulties of a film artist in America.

Yes, masterpieces aren't possible without masters, but lonely is the master with all his masterpieces a long way behind him.