Scorsese equates him with "a magician enchanted by his own magic." This freedom allowed Welles to create from narrative techniques and filmic devices a masterpiece that is self-aware of its own form. It intends to communicate this self-consciousness to the audience, thus contradicting the classical canons of filmmaking whereby the camera ought not to be noticed and the shots should be seamless. In other words, Welles expanded the art form of cinema, using the camera the way a poet uses a pen. He even created fake news footage in unique ways to enhance the film's appearance. His immense influence can be seen more on the art form as later with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Censorship was still rife in Hollywood. The league of decency suppressed adult themes. Elia Kazan's adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) was censored. What we would see now as almost innocent -- a close-up of a woman walking down a stairway -- was considered too risque to be included in the final version of this film. Incredibly, they even switched the jazz music to more conventional music. Scorsese says, "His Streetcar Named Desire caused the first major breach in Hollywood's Production Code." That was because Kazan fought to maintain the integrity of the original play, which meant preserving its carnal themes and filming them microscopically as though penetrating the character. It is meaningful not only that reality kept impinging on film, or that a new acting style (with Brando) was being forged that was ambivalent and challenged moral conscience. More, it was that directors like Kazan did not baulk to challenge the authority of that code. They pushed against it, rather than backing down. They were audacious enough to elaborate on
This film was crucial since it was the first real portrait of drug addiction. American audiences had not been exposed to this level of
realism. After this, through iconoclastic comedy (Billy Wilder) and beyond, the Production Code of the old studio system became virtually obsolete. Arthur Penn's Bonny and Clyde (1967) gave its paper sheet the final rend. In its images of violence, it defied the tradition that wanted to downplay the glory of the outlaw. It allowed one to see a gun fired in the same frame as the victim's wounding. This signified for the first time the real portrayal of the unsanitized horror of violence. Violence could no longer be masked. This was all the more poignant since the U.S. was at war in
Vietnam. The Code was dead. Reality had killed it. Film had caught up with the news.
In sum, Scorsese's documentary history of American cinema is astonishing in its combination of breadth and depth. It chronicles clearly the various types of directors with clear examples that are well-analyzed. Although only a brief personal glimpse, it succeeds in communicating a comprehensive sense of the narrative of film-making. Going back to beginning and on into the 60s, it is truly kaleidoscopic. One does not expect it to convey the
world history of film, for its subject is carefully delimited. Much could be added, and the battle over
morality in film is only one storyline. The others -- director as storyteller, as illusionist, as smuggler -- are just as significant. Scorsese points toward many other great film directors besides the ones he talks about, some unfortunately forgotten. One of the documentary's values is to demonstrate the nuances negotiated between producer and director. But perhaps its greatest value is to show how much there is still to understand about cinema and its history in Hollywood. It is only a pity that this film itself could not keep going on.
