Martin Scorsese and film culture: Radically contextualizing the contemporary auteur

Martin Scorsese and his films have been analyzed extensively since he began making films over four decades ago. Much of this scholarship has focused on formal analysis of the films themselves. Contextual analysis has been either concentrated on his religious and ethnic background or on the historical context of New Hollywood cinema from which he emerged. Scholarship has ignored Scorsese's broader activities in the culture, thus neglecting the ways in which these position his feature films. To fully comprehend Scorsese as a cultural figure, a more radical contextualizing is required. The purpose of this dissertation is to use historical and sociological approaches, particularly those of Pierre Bourdieu, to offer a corrective to the prevailing scholarship, not so much in terms of what has been written, but rather what has not been written. Each chapter focuses on an area of Scorsese's career from a different perspective than has dominated thus far. Chapter One deals with Scorsese's early career before he moves to Hollywood. Instead of analyzing these films in relation to the rest of Scorsese's oeuvre, this chapter places a greater emphasis on the university environment in which Scorsese was immersed. Chapter Two explores the critical environment around the films Scorsese made during his first decade in Hollywood. The chapter eschews formal analysis and/or critical interpretation in order to consider the contingencies involved in the gaining of cultural esteem. Chapter Three offers the most thorough revision of previous Scorsese scholarship. Instead of briefly skimming over the films made during the 1980s, this chapter argues that this decade was critically important to Scorsese's eventual canonization. This is not because of the films themselves, but because of Scorsese's other cultural work, most notably his move into film preservation. Chapter Four continues this approach by analyzing Scorsese's documentaries on cinema history together with his fiction films on past worlds. The final chapter examines what "Scorsese" as a cultural marker has come to represent in contemporary cinema. The main argument is that it is extra-textual factors rather than the films themselves that have led to Scorsese's prestigious position as an artist.