Martin Scorsese Film School

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For the past couple of weeks, movie buffs have been tweeting, discussing, and analyzing this piece from Fast Company, which distilled a four hour interview with Martin Scorsese into a list of 85 films “you need to see to know anything about film” — Mr. Scorsese’s mini-film school, if you will. There are some real surprises on the list: no Kubrick, no Fellini, no Kurosawa, no Peckinpah, very little French New Wave, only one Hitchcock. Meanwhile, there’s more Altman than we might have anticipated, as well as copious amounts of Welles and Rossellini.

If Marty is like us — and we’d like to imagine he is — there’s also a very good chance that these are just the 85 movies that were on his mind that day. Your list of favorite films is a living thing, always changing and amending, growing and revising; we’d bet good American money he thought of five films he should’ve included the second he walked out the door. (The absence of 8 ½, for example, is suspect, since he called it a “personal turning point” in his documentary My Voyage to Italy.) But this is the list he made on that day, in that room, and it’s worth looking at; there are some really interesting choices here, titles worth seeking out if you haven’t seen them.

In the interest of helping you sift through the list and load up your Netflix queue and Amazon cart accordingly, we’ve put together a video essay of clips and stills from the “Scorsese 85,” using his own words when possible (from his wonderful documentaries A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy). We strongly recommend reading the articlefirst, since some of the other clips were chosen specifically to comment his quotes on them (KluteThe Trial, and M*A*S*H, for example). Check out our latest video essay after the jump.