Overview

Martin Scorsese’s Documentary Histories: Migrations, Movies, Music is the first comprehensive study of Martin Scorsese’s prolific work as a documentary filmmaker. Highlighting the historiographic aims of the director’s various non-fiction film, video, and television productions, Mike Meneghetti re-examines Scorsese’s documentaries as resourceful audiovisual histories of migrations, movies, and popular music. Italianamerican’s critical immersion in the post-Sixties ethnic revival inaugurates Scorsese’s decades-long documentary project in 1974, and the era’s developing vernacular of reclamation would shape each of his subsequent non-fiction efforts. Martin Scorsese's Documentary Histories surveys the succeeding films’ decisive adherence to this language of retrieval. With extended analyses of Italianamerican, American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, The Last Waltz, Shine a Light, Feel Like Going Home, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Il mio viaggio in Italia, and A Letter to Elia among others, Meneghetti resituates Scorsese’s filmmaking within the wider contexts of documentary history and American culture.

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9781501375958

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Reviews

A profound reassessment of the director's nonfiction filmmaking, Martin Scorsese's Documentary Histories reads these productions as a dynamic documentary practice that engages in continual and knowing processes of historical mediation. This innovative approach uncovers the distinctive historical character of Scorsese's work, illuminating its strong sense of retrospection; its concern to reconcile past with present; and discerningly, an eye toward the future that motivates his longstanding preservationist activity. This monograph makes a fascinating and significant contribution to critical studies of the director. --Lee Carruthers, author of Doing Time: Temporality, Hermeneutics, and Contemporary Cinema (2016) Martin Scorsese's remarkable, decades-long career as a director of documentaries has been overshadowed by his legendary fiction films. With the guidance of Mike Meneghetti's luminous and inspired book, those documentaries on history and memory, pop music, and cultural preservation finally assume their rightful position as a feature attraction. Meneghetti's book also reframes key movements in documentary filmmaking since the 1960s, especially direct cinema, by exploring Scorsese's complex relationship to that legacy. The stunning chapters on Scorsese's rockumentaries are among the best writing ever produced about that genre, as they capture the delicate balance between labor and play, collective experience and virtuosity at the core of the concert film. This is a book full of revelations about particular movies, the history and theory of nonfiction film, and the grand arc of a career that was constantly reinvigorated through its engagement with the documentary. --James Tweedie, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington, USA

Author Information

Mike Meneghetti is a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Canada. His work has been published in Studies in Documentary Film, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and Film-Philosophy.

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