"Poor Streets": The Source of Scorsese's Existentialist Aesthetics

Hollie 2021-12-08 08:01:44

Note: This article is selected from the old works of last summer. The original text was first published on "The Surging Thought Market" and the WeChat public account "Deep Focus DeepFocus", with the original title "Martin Scorsese, the Great Departing from Cannes". The reason why it is hanging out is just one of the reasons. A few days ago, I saw a bean friend broadcast. It was mentioned in a commentary in the "Cinema Manual" that Scorsese's personality was composed of the "suicidal thug-aesthetician-priest" trinity. I deeply agree, but perhaps it is not new (of course it provides a good analysis framework), "thug + priest" is actually existentialism, and its existential aesthetics is also strongly revealed in "Poor Streets". This work constitutes the source of Scorsese’s aesthetics in many ways, especially its obsession with violence and spirituality; in my opinion it is even more “Scoses” because he will The presentation of violence and spirituality brought back the Little Italy he was most familiar with, and explained in a very new wave way why existentialism is our poison and the last antidote.

Back in the end of 1970, Scorsese, a young lecturer at the New York University Film School, decided to leave the East Coast and head to Hollywood to pursue the mainstream success he desired. He got his first directing opportunity in Hollywood from the "king of B-rated film" Roger Koeman, and filmed an "exploitation film" with violence as a selling point, "Cold Blood Thunderbolt" for the latter. The film annoyed his spiritual mentor in New York and the pioneer of American independent filmmaking, John Kassavits. Knock on my door? "Such a film with a strong personal style. As a result, Scorsese began to revise a script that had been rejected many times and had been in the dust for a long time, that is, "Poor Streets". This film became Scorsese's icebreaker and also marked the maturity of his personal aesthetics.

The film tells the story of several young people living in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York. The protagonist is "Young and Dangerous New York" Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and his friend Johnny (Robert De Niro). The plot The clue is the debt collection and evasion between Mike and Johnny. As the second generation of Italian immigrants who grew up in New York, Scorsese put a lot of personal sustenance in the film, and the film has a strong autobiographical color, and even the ending (Charlie and Johnny were shot by Mike while driving) was based on the director himself experience. The film title "Mean Streets" (or translated "Cruel Street") comes from the book "Simple Murder Art" by the tough detective novelist Raymond Chandler: "A man must step into these poor streets , Although he himself is not cruel".

From this we can foresee the film noir style: the presentation of urban crime and violence, the morally ambiguous characters and the gloomy and gloomy spatial landscape, as well as the potential sociopolitical significance. It is difficult to say whether it was the life experience of Little Italy that made Scorsese obsessed with the presentation of violence throughout his life, or the obsession with violence that made him return to "Little Italy" again and again. In any case, "Poor Streets" did start a series of violence on the screen including "Taxi Driver", "Angry Bull", "Good Guys", "New York Gangs", etc.

In "Poor Streets", Little Italy indeed constitutes a perfect narrative space, and its perfection comes from its closedness-more cruel than cruelty itself, cruelty is inexhaustible. This kind of closure is first reflected in Charlie’s girlfriend Trisha asking Charlie to accompany her to leave Little Italy. She repeatedly asked, but Charlie repeatedly refused; then, in the rooftop shooting scene of Johnny and Charlie, it once again adopted a dialectical posture. Appearing: In the night, the Empire State Building that Johnny was going to shoot at finally only flashed in the fuzzy perspective. Their crazy and desperate behavior could only end in returning to the ground in the Little Italy neighborhood. Therefore, the closedness of space is condensed into an abstraction, pointing to an inescapable tragic fate: to survive in violence and evil, and to be swallowed by violence and evil in the end. The third and final time of the closed space appeared at the end of the film. When the protagonists tried to escape from Little Italy, their fate directly appeared, leaving them on the cruel streets of Little Italy in a very cruel way. Interestingly, it was Scorsese who shot at them sitting in the back seat of Mike's car. In "Poor Streets", he becomes the perpetrator of ultimate violence. Can this be regarded as an allegory of "authorship"?

However, in the film, Scorsese does not set the inevitable escape of space/violence as some kind of elusive and unspeakable fate. In fact, we can easily find that Charlie's refusal to leave Little Italy is not only the restaurant promised by his uncle, but also because of his existentialism. As we all know, besides the Mafia, the specialty of Italy is also Catholic. The most famous scene in the film is that Charlie stretches his hand to the flame to detect his inner guilt and pain.

But Charlie is obviously not a classical devout Catholic. Scorsese, who loves Dostoevsky, gave him the connotation of the post-Nietzsche era, which is mainly realized through the role of Johnny. Johnny's appearance was very dramatic, he blew up a mailbox, and the film did not explain any reason for this. In other words, Johnny means a kind of uncaused, pure evil (even if it is not evil, it is stubborn). Because of this, the friendship between Charlie and him is like Faust and Mephistopheles or the Karamazov family of good and evil, and the New York bars and strippers that Charlie wandered around have also become black in "Steppenwolves". The meaning of the Eagle Tavern. The film even used the shady voice-over at the beginning to show this relationship (interestingly, this voice-over is also from the director himself): "You are not in the church but on the street, at home, atonement, and everything else It’s shit, you know it well” (“You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it”. In other words, strong Ni is exactly where Charlie’s salvation lies. What he gives Charlie is not hope, but a choice toward evil—and the free will on which the choice is based is the inner essence of "existence before essence." Therefore, Charlie does not treat Johnny. The persistence of asking about good and evil also has an existential metaphysical color. The strong religious guilt and existential redemptive pursuit in "Poor Streets" has also become a major motif of the Stewart film, which has spread to "Taxi Driver", "The Last Temptation of Christ", "The Silence" and other works.

If violence and its salvation constitute the depth of the theme of "Poor Streets", then its formal style is even more admired. When Scorsese entered the New York Film Academy to study film in 1960, the French New Wave had become popular in the New York film circle, and he soon became a believer of the Truffaus. The French New Wave takes "movie as the asymptote of reality" as its standard, and emphasizes the use of scene scheduling and depth-of-field shots to achieve a naturalistic documentary style. In "Poor Streets", Scorsese also used handheld cameras and complex scene scheduling techniques to achieve the "record" of the spatial landscape and personnel in Little Italy; although due to insufficient funding, most of the indoor scenes were completed in Los Angeles , But due to superb editing, the realism of the film has not been destroyed. Reality also comes from the plot configuration. Unlike classical Hollywood’s emphasis on interlocking plot causality, "Poor Streets" is full of accidents: sudden tavern murders, inexplicable fights...Similarly, the film is exposed to the jungle of violence. The characters in the movie do not have the heroic style of the works of former American directors such as John Ford and Pekinpa. The action scenes have neither stuntmen as stand-ins, nor dance-style action arrangements, only the clumsiness of street gangsters in the real world. . All of this gives the film a rough and fierce documentary sense.

However, although he has benefited greatly from the new wave in France, Scorsese is more like a miscellaneous family who has transferred to Yiduo. As an Italian, he was naturally familiar with post-war Italian films. Indeed, "Poor Streets"'s presentation of the internal pain and depression of the characters and the questioning of faith in contemporary life are all very reminiscent of Fellini. Roger Ebert thought after watching the film that Scorsese would become the "Fellini of America" ​​in ten years, and Scorsese responded: "Do you really think it will take ten years?".

Different from the above-mentioned elements of European art films, the use of music in "Poor Streets" is purely American. New Hollywood movies are positioned for young people from the counter-cultural movement generation, and they love to distribute the popular music of the same period in the film, such as "Easy Rider" to House of Rising Sun, "Army Field Hospital" to Suicide Is Painless, and "Graduate" As for The Sound of Silence, the opening song of "Poor Streets" is the famous song Be My Baby from the 1960s (very very good in 1960s). It’s worth mentioning that this song may inspire us to open up another space for text: Scorsese even added such a passionate and pure love song to this film of male friendship. Think of the sweet "headshot" and street fight between Charlie and Johnny in the film, not to mention that the two actually had a "bed scene". Regardless of whether Charlie's "obsession" with Johnny is metaphysical religious salvation or another profound meaning, their same-sex friendship is indeed the only light in the dim night of cruel streets.

Although the release was not smooth, "Poor Streets" quickly became a sensation in North American critics. As soon as the film was released, Pauline Kyle, who has always been sharp, exclaimed, “It has an informal, sporadic rhythm and dizzying sensitivity to the presentation of the growing experience in Little Italy. Scorsese showed us It created an unprecedented viscous corruption in American movies, as well as a more mature feeling of sin." It is very possible that the "Director's Fortnight" unit in Cannes noticed this film and Scorsese, who will soon become the leader of the new Hollywood film movement, through the critics—a testament to its response to the new Hollywood movement. In 1969, "Army Field Hospital" won the Palme d’Or; in 1974, Scorsese came to "Director’s Fortnight" in the same year, and his compatriot Coppola also relied on "Eavesdropping." "The Big Conspiracy" took home its first Palme d'Or.

"Poor Streets" 25th Anniversary Poster

Time has brought more praise and admiration to "Poor Streets". In 2013, the American "Entertainment Weekly" even ranked it as the seventh greatest movie in history. Roger Ebert wrote this passage thirty years after the film’s release. It’s probably more fair: “If Coppola’s "The Godfather" presents the Mafia as a shadow government, Scorsese’s "Poor Street" "The Back Alley" opens another main line of modern gangster films about the reality of daily life. The former is about career, and the latter is about work...Great films not only leave a mark on the audience but also the works of later generations. "Poor Street" is in countless ways. Both are one of the sources of modern movies".

View more about Mean Streets reviews

Extended Reading
  • Onie 2022-04-21 09:02:07

    It seems that Martin is really involved in the gang, and the last shot is the predecessor of the taxi!

  • Keely 2022-04-22 07:01:27

    I still remember when my father said to me after watching this film: "If my father hadn't been admitted to the city, he would be like this group of people now." This statement is similar to Scorsese's words to some extent. He said that back then If he hadn't been admitted to the urban village school outside the six Blocks to the west, he would have been living in a world like this one.

Mean Streets quotes

  • Johnny Boy: I was so crazy, I wanted to kill this kid. Meanwhile, I gotta get back in the game, bing bing bing, I lose four hundred dollars!

  • Johnny Boy: Meanwhile, I lost the deal, I go outside, I'm a little depressed, now. Anyway, I wanna cut this story short, 'cause I know you don't wanna hear all this and, I know I know I know, but, I'm gonna - to make a long story short, anyway, I went to Hal Kaplan, gotta new tie and I got this shirt. Do you like this shirt? It's nice. This tie...

    Charlie: Hey! Michael doesn't care if your depressed. What is he - your priest? What do go out shopping when you owe somebody money, Johnny. That ain't right.