Italian Films, New York City Television, and the Work of Martin Scorsese

Abstract

The anecdote about an asthmatic young Marty watching postwar Italian neorealist films on television in his family's Little Italy apartment in Manhattan ranks among the most familiar Martin Scorsese origin myths. Film scholars again and again make straightforward connections between Scorsese and Italian neorealism, but this story remains a simplistic, even sentimentalized, narrative of influence. The relationship between Scorsese and neorealism has been argued outside of strictly academic/film studies circles as well. Only seven months after going on the air, WOR-TV in New York City began a program called Italian Film Theater . At least one postwar neorealist film, some proto-neorealist films, and films with other connections to neorealism also aired. Scorsese's admiration for the art of cinema runs deep, and he has used his public persona and his credentials as a filmmaker to support films outside of mainstream, large-industry systems, American and otherwise.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.