Reading Log #8

I have seen The Wolf of Wall St (2014), The Age of Innocence (1993), Shutter Island (2010) and all those directed by Martin Scorsese has particular style that became the director’s signature in making film. The director often engages with gangster films, with social violence while interested with both European art cinema and Hollywood classical narrative. He is influenced, or inspired by early cinema with long takes and montage such as of Eisenstein and Hitchcock. Elliptical editing is specially a motif in which Scorsese has ritually complemented in The Age of Innocence and other films to reduce time and space.

Different filmmakers have their own individual approach in portraying their character’s mental subjectivity. In The Age of Innocence for example, the character Newland Archer (starring Daniel Day Lewis) desires to be with Ellen Olenski despite already having an engagement with May Welland. Scorsese has shown this perspective from Newland’s point of view shots following Ellen around the room and tracking away from May to dislocate her outside the frame. Montage and jump cuts are often used and became a pattern to portray hallucinations or imaginations of the characters. Similar techniques are also used in The Wolf of Wall St when the main character is under a drug, causing his instability of vision. Both movies promotes the ideologies of the rich families of New York’s high society and this portrayal itself is a motif occurring in many of Scorsese’s films.