The desire to make images move, the need to capture movement seems to be with us 30,000 years ago in the cave paintings of Chauvet. … [T]he bison appears to have multiple sets of legs. Maybe that was the artist’s way of creating the impression of movement. I think this need to recreate movement is a mystical urge. It’s an attempt to capture the mystery of who and what we are and then to think about, to contemplate that mystery.

— Martin Scorsese in his 2013 NEH Jefferson Lecture, “Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema.” Fresh Air excerpted the lecture for a portion of our show on Tuesday.

On the show today, we excerpted Martin Scorsese’s 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Jefferson Lecture, titled “Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema.” He shares his wide knowledge of film history (including Eadweard Muybridge’s images of animals in motion from the 1870s and 1880s) and speaks movingly and eloquently about falling in love with the movies as a kid:

My parents had a good reason for taking me to the movies all the time because I was always sick with asthma since I was 3 years old and I apparently couldn’t do any sports. Or that’s what they told me. But really my mother and father did love the movies. They weren’t in the habit of reading — that didn’t’ really exist where I came from — and so we connected through the movies and, over the years, I know now that the warmth of that connection with my family and with the images up on the screen gave me something very precious because we were experiencing something fundamental together: We were living through the emotional truths on the screen together, often in coded form. … Sometimes they were expressed in small things — gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. I mean, we experienced these things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our own lives, and that’s actually part of the wonder. So whenever I hear people dismiss movies as fantasy or make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema.

Image by Eadweard Muybridge

Siskel & Ebert — Taxi Driver. Split vote. Roger thought it was a great character study, Gene thought it was too lurid and violent.

Roger Ebert wrote the first film review that Martin Scorsese ever received—for 1967’s I Call First, later renamed Who’s That Knocking at My Door.

I had been a film critic for seven months when I saw his first film, in 1967. It was titled I Call First, later changed to Who’s That Knocking at My Door. I saw it in “the submarine”—the long, low, narrow, dark screening room knocked together out of pasteboard by the Chicago International Film Festival. I was twenty-five. The festival’s founder, Michael Kutza, was under thirty. Everything was still at the beginning. This film had a quality that sent tingles up my arms. It felt made out of my dreams and guilts. I consider him the most gifted director of his generation, and have joked that I will never stop writing film reviews until he stops making films. —Roger Ebert, an excerpt from Scorsese by Ebert

Martin Scorsese on the passing of Roger Ebert:

“The death of Roger Ebert is an incalculable loss for movie culture and for film criticism. And it’s a loss for me personally. Roger was always supportive, he was always right there for me when I needed it most, when it really counted – at the very beginning, when every word of encouragement was precious; and then again, when I was at the lowest ebb of my career, there he was, just as encouraging, just as warmly supportive. There was a professional distance between us, but then I could talk to him much more freely than I could to other critics. Really, Roger was my friend. It’s that simple. Few people I’ve known in my life loved or cared as much about movies. I know that’s what kept him going in those last years – his life-or-death passion for movies, and his wonderful wife, Chaz. We all knew that this moment was coming, but that doesn’t make the loss any less wrenching. I’ll miss him — my dear friend, Roger Ebert.” —Martin Scorsese, April 4, 2013

via cinephilearchive

Martin Scorsese filming Taxi Driver. 

Heidi Saman back on Tumblr.  Good morning everyone!

(Source: isharayar)

Best Directors on Fresh Air

Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Terrence Malick, Tree of Life

David Edelstein says, “You must heed the subliminal advertising in the title. YOU GO.”