Through the multiple voices that are heard throughout the book and which author Mary Pat Kelly recorded throughout the years, “Martin Scorsese: A Journey” is a trip through the filmography of the great filmmaker, seen through the perspective of his close collaborators, but also of the director himself.

It’s a privilege for us, cinephiles, to still have amongst us one of the directors who have changed the face of American cinema throughout the last six decades. To be able to see a new film of his in the cinemas, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), which is already counted amongst the essential titles of his career, and to see him talking on YouTube, in recordings of interviews or from festivals talks – in his characteristic style, animated by energy and passion –, about his films or those made by other filmmakers, from yesteryear to today.

And, voila, we also have the chance to read a (new) book about him. Recently published at Nemira, translated in Romanian by Anamaria Manolescu, Mary Pat Kelly’s Martin Scorsese: A Journey is only the second title available in Romanian about the American director, after Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie, which was released in Romanian in 2001, by ALFFA Publishing. It’s a book that leads us through the entire filmography of Scorsese, from his student films and his first independent features, which were starting to attract attention to him, to his newest feat, which is discussed in the preface. Besides, the release of the book – included in Nemira’s necessary Yorick collection, which also contains, amongst others, the autobiographies of names such as Ingmar Bergman and Charles Chaplin – was made to coincide with the local release of Killers of the Flower Moon (alongside with a new edition of the Romanian translation of David Grann’s eponymous non-fiction novel at RAO Publishing, which laid the foundation for the film’s script).

Mary Pat Kelly has known Scorsese since the mid-1960s, when, as a young student at a Catholic seminar, she sent a letter to the New York University (NYU) in which she requested to see It’s Not Just You, Murray!, a short film that has attracted considerable attention and which she wanted to compare to James Joyce’s Grace, for her graduation thesis. She received a 16mm copy of the film from Scorsese himself, together with a tiny letter in which the directing student expressed his support, alongside the confession that he had also been a seminar student for a year, and had considered a career in the clergy. This was the beginning of a long exchange of letters and of a lifelong friendship, based on their early inclinations toward religion and, of course, their passion for cinema. A friendship that led to the present book, Martin Scorsese: A Journey, which Mary Pat Kelly worked on for decades, collecting interviews and doing research. In her interventions at the beginning of each chapter, she describes the films of her filmmaker friend especially through the perspective of their spiritual themes, especially the desire for deliverance felt by the decadent characters that are scattered throughout the filmmaker’s oeuvre.

It’s a book that follows the principles of montage, sort of like a talking heads documentary: the author cuts and chronologically assembles fragments from interviews over the years with 69 collaborators (from actors and producers to writers, cinematographers, editors, and agents) and with Scorsese’s loved ones (especially his parents, who were also cast in some of his films), together with the guiding thread of his own voice. The testimonies, which often complete and reinforce one another, while sometimes even funnily contradicting each other, reveal the films’ contexts and the process of making each film, with all their unique challenges. It’s a truly fascinating incursion in the manner of working and artistic universe of a filmmaker who, despite working within the studio system of Hollywood (sometimes as a star, sometimes as an outsider, especially after one box office failure or another), managed to create his own style, one that is immediately recognizable, and to leave an impression onto all of his projects, including those that started as so-called commissions.

Of course, these testimonies, even though they’re grouped around his films, are focused on Scorsese himself, and so, the final portrait is very complex. We (re)discover a jovial man with an acutely visual style of thinking, an ambitious and vital filmmaker, who wasn’t discouraged by his failures and turned vain by his successes, obsessed by a handful of topics and themes (mainly the description of New York and the desire to save one’s soul, in a damned world) which he has explored, in various ways, throughout his entire career (whether they were gangster movies, spiritual films, thrillers of dramas featuring larger-than-life protagonists). A careful artist who has always been generous with his collaborators, who he has also turned into his friends (for example, his famous longstanding collaborations with Robert de Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, the latter of which penned the introduction to the book). A director for whom cinephilia is more than just a rich source of inspiration (without said influences distorting his voice), but a lifelong project, through his attempt to conserve heritage cinema from all over the world (an aspect which is treated within the book’s final chapter).

Rich in revelatory information and details, which come together as if they were a puzzle, Martin Scorsese: A Journey is a great book to understand the efforts behind his numerous films, a majority of which have become landmarks in the history of American cinema. A guided tour throughout the works and, at times, the life of an iconoclastic filmmaker.

The quote from the title: Kelly quotes the director talking to a group of journalists at the 1988 Venice International Film Festival which screened his controversial The Last Temptation of Christ.

Main photo credit: Far Out Magazine

Ionuț Mareș

Journalist and film critic. Curator for some film festivals in Romania. At "Films in Frame" publishes interviews with both young and established filmmakers.