Film Directors:

Catalog description

Directors vary per semester. Check departmental listings. For Spring 2026: MARTIN SCORSESE Martin Scorsese is one of the most celebrated of American feature film directors (along with documentaries, long and short). His name even adorns the title of our department (as well as scholarships in the department and Tisch's Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center in Brooklyn). This course sets out to study the director and the development of his reputation through close study of key films across his career. We will look at such topics as: ethnicity, community, masculinity, representations of privileged individuals (such as artists, whether they merit that privilege or not), criminality and morality, distinctions of non-fiction and fiction film, musical soundtracks, genre, and so on. We will also give a key place to Scorsese’s efforts around film history: his film preservation work; his own written histories of film as well as documentaries on specific national cinemas; the ways his own films take inspiration from the trajectory of cinema — and sometimes build direct direct reference to it in their narratives — from its silent days to the affordances of special effects today (like 3D with the movie Hugo, about the earliest days of cinema).