A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is a 1995 British documentary film of 225 minutes in length, presented by Martin Scorsese and produced by the British Film Institute. In the film Martin Scorsese examines a selection of his favorite American films grouped according to four different types of directors: the director as storyteller; the director as an illusionist such as D.W. Griffith and F. W. Murnau, who created new editing techniques among other innovations that made the appearance of sound and color possible later on; the director as a smuggler such as filmmakers Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller, and Vincente Minnelli, who used to hide subversive messages in their films; and the director as an iconoclast, those filmmakers attacking social conventionalism such as Charles Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Sam Peckinpah.

Summary

The documentary is structured in segments: It was originally shown on television in the UK in 1995.

Films mentioned

(Roughly in the order of the appearance.)

Part I

The Director as Storyteller

The Western The Gangster Film The Musical

Part II

The Director as Illusionist

The Director as Smuggler

Part III

The Director as Iconoclast