Scorsese show is a full portrait
A touring exhibition now in Paris focuses on the director’s career and life.
PARIS — With its picturesque boulevards and scenic views of the Seine River, this city’s 12th arrondissement feels like a universe away from the grungy mean streets of New York where Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta and Henry Hill waged their earthly and spiritual battles.
But it’s here at the Cinémathèque Française where the films of Martin Scorsese have taken up residence in an unprecedented scholarly exhibition of the director’s work.
Occupying an entire floor of the Cinémathèque’s Frank Gehry-designed headquarters, the exhibition — simply titled “Scorsese” — is a curated cornuco-
pia designed to satisfy the director’s die-hard admirers and casual fans alike.
The exhibition has been hard to miss in Paris, where heavy promotion throughout the city has included gargantuan ads in certain subway and train stations.
Rather than taking a chronological approach, the show unfolds through a series of broadly themed chapters such as Italian American family life, brotherhood and New York. The exhibition mixes the personal and professional, the sacred and profane, creating a space where Scorsese’s filmography and biography merge into one.
A sampling of personal effects includes the dining table from the Scorsese family’s apartment in Little Italy; storyboards for the climactic blood bath in “Taxi Driver”; intimate snapshots showing the filmmaker with his daughters on the sets of movies; and a silver automaton from “Hugo.”
But capturing the restless, confrontational energy of Scorsese’s movies required more than just assembling static items from the filmmaker’s archives.
“It’s difficult to do an exhibition on Martin Scorsese,” said Serge Toubiana, the Cinémathèque’s director, in his office overlooking the city. That’s because the essence of his films resides in his compositions and kinetic editing style, he explained.
“In order to understand these personal items, you first have to have the jolt of cinema. … He’s a truly visual artist.”
The Cinémathèque’s exhibition is populated with screens of varying sizes, each rolling clips that range from the iconic (Bickle’s “You talkin to me?”) to the more obscure (the ethereal climax to “Kundun”).
One screen explores the way Scorsese depicts women in a masculine world. A vicious, F-word-laden fight between Sharon Stone and Robert De Niro in “Casino” is contrasted with a clandestine kiss between Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer in “The Age of Innocence.”
An area near the end of the exhibition delves into Scorsese’s innovative use of pop music, with clips spotlighting his long association with the Rolling Stones.
“The Departed” — Scorsese’s sole Oscar win — gets prominent placement in a section devoted to his collaboration with longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
The installation alternates the Chinatown pursuit between Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon with the punishing fight in “Raging Bull” between De Niro’s LaMotta and Johnny Barnes’ Sugar Ray Robinson.
“The editing is in his mind before he shoots,” said Matthieu Orléan, an artistic collaborator at the Cinémathèque, who helped to organize the show.
He said Scorsese’s body of work is marked by “the reoccurrence of different themes.” The Cinémathèque devotes an entire section to the image of crucifixions in Scorsese’s movies. (The director was raised a Catholic and once aspired to the priesthood.)
“The Last Temptation of Christ,” his controversial adaptation of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel, culminates with Jesus on the cross, but there is also crucifixion imagery in “Boxcar Bertha,” “Cape Fear” and “Gangs of New York.”
The retrospective originated in a different format at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin in 2013 before traveling to Turin, Italy, and Ghent, Belgium, prior to coming to Paris.
Organizers in Berlin initially approached Scorsese about doing an exhibition devoted to storyboards and later widened their request to other items in his personal collection.
“That took him a while to come to a decision,” recalled Kristina Jaspers, a curator at the Deutsche Kinemathek, who created the exhibition along with Nils Warnecke.
After he agreed, the director became involved in choosing items for the show, through his assistant Marianne Bower.
He would ask if “we could put this storyboard into that chapter of the show or if this photo would fit on that wall,” said Jaspers via email.
The Paris version features a substantially different layout, with an emphasis on low lighting and neon signs to evoke the urban world of the director’s most notable movies.
Scorsese, who wasn’t available for comment, attended the Paris opening of the exhibition in October, a glitzy event that drew French President François Hollande.
The show’s organizers in Paris and Berlin said the U.S. debut will take place in New York at the Museum of the Moving Image, located in the borough of Queens, where Scorsese was born in 1942. They said the opening is set for December 2016, although a spokeswoman for the museum said she could not confirm details at this time.
Attendance for “Scorsese” in Paris has been strong, organizers said, but the exhibition suffered a setback following the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks. Like virtually all of the cultural institutions in Paris, the Cinémathèque closed for a few days. It said attendance still hasn’t returned to pre-Nov. 13 levels.
The Cinémathèque said it hopes to see close to 100,000 admissions for the Scorsese show, which ends in mid-February.
Its record holder is the Tim Burton exhibition from New York’s Museum of Modern Art that drew about 350,000 visitors during a fivemonth run in 2012.
For fans, the Scorsese exhibition can be a trove of unexpected revelations, especially when it comes to his short films.
His early short “The Big Shave,” in which a man’s morning ritual devolves into a bloody mess, is on view, as is his more recent “The Key to Reserva,” a commercial that takes the form of a multilayered homage to Alfred Hitchcock.
Many items are easy to overlook: the Palme d’Or that Scorsese won for “Taxi Driver” at the Cannes Film Festival; a letter from a Baptist clergyman praising “The Last Temptation of Christ”; and a fan letter from filmmaker Alain Resnais extolling “Kundun.”
The retrospective also provides a peek ahead: Spread throughout the exhibition are a few photos from the set of “Silence,” his longplanned adaptation of the Shusaku Endo novel about Catholic priests facing persecution in 17th century Japan.
“Silence,” starring Andrew Garfield and Liam Neeson, is in post-production and is expected to be released next year.