Thoughts inspired by seeing Richard Kelly's The Box a week after Scorsese's birthday

Scorsese might be the father of American "post-classical" cinema. He - along with De Palma, Bogdanovich, Spielberg, Milius, and Lucas - developed a style that grew out of his love for classical Hollywood filmmaking. Scorsese took the expressive techniques of Ford, Hitchcock, and Lang and used them in such a way that his original emotional and intellectual reaction to those techniques became part of how his movies make meaning. Scorsese's personal take on film history is woven into the texture of his movies, even if - as in Raging Bull or After Hours - the explicit subject has nothing to do with cinema.

I would differentiate Scorsese et al. from Robert Altman and Terrence Malick. Though Altman's movies were in dialogue with those from Classical Hollywood (i.e. The Long Goodbye with The Big Sleep, McCabe and Mrs. Miller with My Darling Clementine), Altman's style isn't informed by his attachment to those older movies in any way. (Richard Linklater is a modern Altman in this respect). While Malick - like Michael Mann and M. Night Shyamalan - makes movies as if no one has ever made a movie before.

Today's "post-classical" directors - P.T. Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Steven Soderbergh, and Richard Kelly - go even farther, making movies where their original emotional and intellectual reaction to the movies they loved exists not only as a subdermal layer of meaning but becomes, in some ways, the primary layer of meaning. The Box, for example, is more of an exploration of Lynchian acting and an exercise in turning suburbia into one of Kubrick's dream/nightmare realms than it is an ethical parable or sci-fi thriller.

This movement is toward decadence and Tarantino is it's Oscar Wilde: his great subject has become the way that our relationship to the movies we love can act as a way of being in the world - a way of coming to a greater sense of self-understanding.

The Greatest

Over in the comments at Sean Collins' blog, I talk a little bit about Casino - one of my favorite Scorsese movies - and different ways to measure greatness (by way of answering the question of Scorsese vs. Malick).