It will be a “more of less complete” showing of the director’s work, says curator Claude Bertemes (photo, right). “Of course the oeuvre of Scorsese is quite big, so this will run over four months, from the very beginning--the lesser known works--to the recent ones.”
“It’s a big thing because Scorsese is a lobbyist for the interests of cinémathèques,” Bertemes explains.
The curator says Scorsese shot the boxing film Raging Bull (1980) in black and white “as a sign of protest against the manufactures of film stock who, at the time, were working with Eastman Color. And Eastman Color was a colour process that was not stable on prints.” After a few years, prints became reddish in colour and were un-projectable. “Martin Scorsese said ‘you’re not solving this problem, so I won’t do a film in colour.’ Then after that, indeed, the colour industry changed the process and now the colours are stable on prints.”
Bertemes says that was the beginning of the director’s championing of the cinémathèque movement, and Scorsese has since co-created the World Cinema Foundation, which supports film archives internationally. “That’s how he’s attached to film preservation, as a mission, as an important cultural mission to save film heritage.”
The retrospective will be shown at the Cinémathèque’s Place du Théâtre cinema. It begins Tuesday 3 January at 8:30 pm with Taxi Driver (1976).
On Tuesday 10 January at 8:30 pm, Michel Cieutat--the Canadian author of Martin Scorsese--will present a ciné-conférence about the director’s work, which will be followed by the screening of Mean Streets (1973)