The Scorsese Connection

Lesley Stern has written a daringly innovative book on the work of Martin Scorsese, the most important contemporary film-maker in North America. Her vivid account invites the reader to enter into a liminal world where texts, films and personal subjectivity freely mix. She explores two main avenues: the way Scorsese remakes other movies (Raging Bull replays The Red Shoes, Taxi Driver triggers a resurgence of The Searchers, Cape Fear reanimates The Night of the Hunter and Blue Velvet), and the way we, as viewers, absorb and make sense 'with' films rather than of them, using our sense of touch and smell as well as our ears and eyes. Her prose weaves its own spells while circling around Scorsese's red-hot cinema, darting deep into the heart of the cauldron and then withdrawing, detouring through adjacent terrains while the thoughts and feelings triggered by the experience of viewing Scorsese's work reverberate in our everyday life as well as in our mental universe. When Lesley Stern watches films, especially Scorsese's, sparks fly, igniting connections, illuminating memories, recalling fragments of books or essays read, moments from other film experiences, personal encounters.