Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective

Born in New York City in 1942 to Sicilian-American parents, Scorsese spent much of his childhood absorbing the sights and sounds of Little Italy from the balcony of his family’s tenement apartment – music blaring, drunks brawling and neighbourhood kids playing stickball. A lifelong asthma sufferer, he took no part in his friends’ games and instead fell in love with cinema at an early age, crafting intricate storyboards for as-yet-unmade Westerns and Roman epics.

This long apprenticeship paid off in 1962 when Scorsese was accepted onto a film course at New York University and immediately attracted attention with a series of quirky and technically accomplished student shorts. Having made his breakthrough with the gritty Mean Streets (1973), Scorsese outgrew his early reputation as a virtuoso of violence, creating films as diverse as a nineteenth-century literary romance, The Age of Innocence (1993), a dramatization of the early life of the Dalai Lama, Kundun (1997), and a 3D children’s fantasy, Hugo (2011). This lavish retrospective is a fitting tribute to a remarkable director, now into his seventh decade in cinema and showing no signs of slowing up.

Leading film writer Tom Shone draws on his in-depth knowledge and distinctive viewpoint to present refreshing commentaries on all twenty-six main features, from the rarely shown Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) to The Irishman (2019), as well as covering Scorsese’s notable parallel career as a documentary maker. Impeccably designed, and copiously illustrated with more than two hundred stills and behind-the-scenes images, this is the definitive celebration of one of cinema’s most enduring talents.