"You don't make up for your sins in church - you do it on the streets, you do it at home. The rest is bull*censored*, and you know it." (Charlie)
             Of all the film-makers dicussed here, none exploded with quite such volatile energy on the American screen as Martin Scorsese, with Mean Streets, in 1973. Of all our blood poets, none have displayed quite such a thirst and an appetite for ectoplasm either, nor such a painterly eye for the aesthetic virtues of blood. His films are positively soaked in it, yet Scorsese differs from other directors (whose shared mentors were that sacred trinity of savagery - Leone, Penn, Peckinpah) in two, all-important ways: He is Sicilian American (and like Don Vito Corleone, the emphasis is on the Sicilian), and he is a Catholic. Scorsese's films, at least through until Raging Bull, have a sensual, expressionistic depth and texture that one associates more with European auteurs such as Truffaut, Buñuel and Bertolucci than with the American trash-gurus such as Fuller (or even Hawkes and Ford). He also has a rare and suprisingly enriching (to his art at least) sense of sin. Scorsese is, of all t!
             he American directors that emerged in the 70's, the one with the clearest vision of modern civilization as Hell.
             Martin Scorsese's first film - a short called What's a Nice Girl Like you Doing in Place Like This? - was made in that halcyon year, 1963; four years later, in 1967, Scorsese made a third short film, The Big Shave - a one scene vignette-parable in which the sole character - the first real Scorsese protagonist and something of a prototype for all the rest to come - stands in front of a mirror to shave. As he progresses, he begins to cut himself, but rather than stopping to lance the wounds, he continues slicing and gashing away at his face with a ferocious, fatalistic and suicidal compulsion, until finaly he slits his own throat. A more revealing and fitting harbinger for Scorsese's career in ...