Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee

Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee
Author: James F. Scott
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2019-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1498548970

Directors Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Spike Lee emerged as filmmakers toward the end of the 1960s, when the breakdown of the studio system paved the way for new production partnerships and gave more creative authority to directors, actors, and writers. In what has come to be called the “Indie” movement, these directors were able to explore ethno-racial themes with more frankness than previously allowed. From the perspectives of their own minority communities, Scorsese, Allen, and Lee dramatized and critiqued the challenges this restless, ethno-racial underclass posed to the “White Republic” imagined by the Founding Fathers. The three directors whose work is at the heart of this book explore the question of how identity formation is a process of negotiation, particularly among America’s ethno-racial minorities. They emphasize the stresses related to the double burden in the assimilative process of patterning oneself after the majoritarian culture, while acknowledging in complex ways the culture of the community of origin. Annie Hall tells Alvie Singer, “you’re a real Jew.” Buggin’ Out instructs his homeboy friend, “Stay Black, Mookie!” What implications do these phrases carry? Will Alvie have a chance to modify his identity? Should he? Will Mookie honor his friend’s admonition? Is “black” also susceptible to a cultural makeover? Is identity a personal choice? This book highlights how various films by these three directors explore the ways in which “cultural capital” (musical, artistic, intellectual, athletic, etc.) is used to erase “ethno-racial taint” (skin tones, supposed biological “traits,” offensive cultural habits). The formula ordains that assimilation and interculturation will be asymmetrical, favoring those groups or individuals who bring with them the most cultural capital.

Street Smart

Street Smart
Author: Richard Aloysius Blake
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780813171678

New York has appeared in more movies than Michael Caine, and as a result of overfamiliarity, the City poses a problem for critics and casual moviegoers alike. Audiences mistake the New York image of skyscrapers and glitter for the real thing, but in fact the City is a network of small villages, each with its unique personality. Street Smart offers a novel approach to understanding the cultural influences of New York's neighborhoods on the work of four quintessentially New York filmmakers: Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. The city's diverse economic and ethnic enclaves, where people live, work, shop, worship, bank, and go to school, often have little relationship to the concept of New York City created by the movies. Their New York, however, is as real as the smell of fried onions in the stairwell of an apartment building, and it is this New York, not the movie New York, that has left its impression on their films. Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee's imaginations have been shaped by their neighborhoods, not the New York of the movies. In turn, these directors have used their own life experiences to shape their films. Richard A. Blake examines their home villages -- from Flatbush and Fort Green in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan -- to enrich our critical understanding of the films of four of America's most accomplished contemporary filmmakers.

Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee

Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee
Author: James F. Scott
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2021-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781498548984

At a moment in history when the status of minorities, particularly ethno-racial minorities, is the subject of intense, often acrimonious debate, this book offers a timely and relevant discussion of the core themes of assimilation, interculturation, and identity in the oeuvre of three independent American filmmakers: Scorsese, Allen, and Lee.

Spike Lee

Spike Lee
Author: Spike Lee
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781578064700

Since his first feature movie, She's Gotta Have It (1986), gave him critical and commercial success, Spike Lee has challenged audiences with one controversial film after another. Lee has made a broad range of movies, including documentaries (4 Little Girls), musicals (School Daze), crime dramas (Clockers), biopics (Malcolm X).

Scenes from the City

Scenes from the City
Author: James Sanders
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2014-03-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0847842908

Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York is a celebration of the rise of New York-shot films, particularly after the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting was formed in 1966. This revised and expanded edition, edited by James Sanders, includes a new decade of filmmaking in NYC, a section on women filmmakers and rare, behind-the-scenes shots directly from studio archives. It also explores the recent growth of the City's television industry with more episodic series being produced in New York City now than ever before. Today's the City's entertainment industry employs 130,000 New Yorkers and contributes more than $7 billion to the local economy each year.

City that Never Sleeps

City that Never Sleeps
Author: Murray Pomerance
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813540320

New York, more than any other city, has held a special fascination for filmmakers and viewers. In every decade of Hollywood filmmaking, artists of the screen have fixated upon this fascinating place for its tensions and promises, dazzling illumination and fearsome darkness. From Street Scene and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Rosemary's Baby, The Warriors, and 25th Hour, the sixteen essays in this book explore the cinematic representation of New York as a city of experience, as a locus of ideographic characters and spaces, as a city of moves and traps, and as a site of allurement and danger.

Rumble and Crash

Rumble and Crash
Author: Milo Sweedler
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2019-02-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 143847279X

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism’s precarious state in the early twenty-first century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein. These films, Milo Sweedler argues, give narrative and audiovisual form to the increasingly pervasive sense that the economic system we have known and accepted as inevitable and ubiquitous is in fact riddled with self-destructive flaws. Analyzing four movies from before the global financial crisis of 2008 and two that allegorize the financial meltdown itself, Sweedler explores how cinema responded to one of the defining crises of our time. Films examined include Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana(2005), Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005), Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006), Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013). “Milo Sweedler has produced what are surely the most original, provocative, and downright dazzling readings of a handful of socially significant and potent films released during the tumultuous years from 2005 to 2013. This is a fine book.” — David Desser, former editor, Cinema Journal

Hollywood's New Yorker

Hollywood's New Yorker
Author: Marc Raymond
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2013-03-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1438445733

When Martin Scorsese finally won an Academy Award in 2007, for The Departed, it was widely viewed as the crowning achievement of a remarkable film career. But what it also represented was an acceptance by Hollywood of a man who became a prestigious auteur precisely because of his status as an outsider from New York. For someone with a high-culture reputation like Scorsese's, this middlebrow sign of respectability was not about cultural standing; rather, it was about using and even sacrificing his distinctive outsider status for a greater share of industry authority within the world of Hollywood. In Hollywood's New Yorker, Marc Raymond offers a fresh look at Scorsese's career in relation to the critical and social environment of the past fifty years. He traces Scorsese's career and films through his association with various cultural institutions, from his role as a student and instructor at New York University, to his move to Hollywood and his relationship with the studio system, to his relationship with prestigious institutions like the Museum of Modern Art. This sociological approach to film authorship provides analysis of previously overlooked Scorsese projects, particularly his documentary work, and gives importance to the role his extracurricular activities in the film preservation movement have played in the rise of his reputation. Hollywood's New Yorker places Scorsese and his films firmly within the various time periods of his career and compares the director with his peers, from fellow New Yorkers like Brian De Palma and Woody Allen to New Hollywood movie brats such as Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. The result is a complete picture of Scorsese and the post–World War II American film culture he has both shaped and been shaped by.

The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese

The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese
Author: Mark Conard
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2007-05-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0813172551

Academy Award–winning director Martin Scorsese is one of the most significant American filmmakers in the history of cinema. Although best known for his movies about gangsters and violence, such as Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and Taxi Driver, Scorsese has addressed a much wider range of themes and topics in the four decades of his career. In The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese, an impressive cast of contributors explores the complex themes and philosophical underpinnings of Martin Scorsese’s films. The essays concerning Scorsese’s films about crime and violence investigate the nature of friendship, the ethics of vigilantism, and the nature of unhappiness. The authors delve deeply into the minds of Scorsese’s tortured characters and explore how the men and women he depicts grapple with moral codes and their emotions. Several of the essays explore specific themes in individual films. The authors describe how Scorsese addresses the nuances of social mores and values in The Age of Innocence, the nature of temptation and self-sacrifice in The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead, and the complexities of innovation and ambition in The Aviator. Other chapters in the collection examine larger philosophical questions. In a world where everything can be interpreted as meaningful, Scorsese at times uses his films to teach audiences about the meaning in life beyond the everyday world depicted in the cinema. For example, his films touching on religious subjects, such as Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ, allow the director to explore spiritualism and peaceful ways of responding to the chaos in the world.Filled with penetrating insights on Scorsese’s body of work, The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese shows the director engaging with many of the most basic questions about our humanity and how we relate to one another in a complex world.

Cinema Today

Cinema Today
Author: Edward Buscombe
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005-04-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780714845166

A comprehensive survey of world cinema since 1970.