Visual Literacy is a Grammar, Scorsese Says

American cinema director Martin Scorsese told an interviewer that close shots, long shots, camera pans and lighting constitute part of every filmmaker's grammar that needs to be taught to children outside the profession if civilization is to survive.

"You know I came from a working class family, my mother and father weren't well-educated. I'm second-generation I guess Italian-American. There was no tradition of reading in the house. There was more of a visual tradition."

00:22 Of course, I read in school, etc. I read books in school and that sort of thing, but the-- it was more of a visual tradition, more if-- I was taken to movie theaters a lot.

Also, being a sickly child with very severe asthma, I couldn't play sports. So, again, the movie theater. The movie theater and the church. The church and the movie theatre.

And so, along with the films, there was also the advent of television, 1948, '49, in the heyday of really the best-- some of the best programming in American television-- in the history of American television up to this point with the fifties, 1950s. And so I saw a lot of television shows, but also films on television.

Being a working class family, too, they didn't have enough money to go to the theatre, so theatre wasn't an option, live stage shows. So, it was mainly visual literacy what was-- was what was happening at that time to me. I did not understand that that was happening.

What it made me realize was that there was an intelligence, another kind of intelligence, that was trying to tell a story through where the director, the writer and the cinematographer, where they were focusing your eyes, you know. Whether it was the-- the camera may be at an extremely low angle, looking up at you, the use of the lens, the size of the lens. I began to understand certain lenses did-- interpreted the story differently.

A longer lens crushed everything together and made it flat. A wider lens stretched everything and sometimes distorted it, especially if camera movement-- I learned looking at certain pictures, particularly Welles's films and William Wyler, too. A wide angle lens, but Wyler used his wide angle lens in a very strong, steady image, but Welles used that wide angle lens, 18 mm, it turns out very often, to move along the walls, move along-- and you really felt-- I felt as if the camera was flying, as if the story was flying by, you know.

I didn't know why until I kept seeing the films again and again, and as I began to know a little more about what filmmaking was like and what cameras did, and at that's-- I still didn't know who made the pictures, you know, but I was beginning to understand that there are certain tools you use, and those tools become part of a vocabulary that's just as valid as that vocabulary that is used in literature and our language.

One would think he would keep trade secrets to himself and his friends or proteges in the film industry. But Scorsese says it's now time to share this grammar more widely, with children who never plan to go into filmmaking:

02:59 >>Scorsese: One has to begin, I think, reach younger people at an earlier age for that to shape their minds to-- in a critical way-- a critical way of looking at these images and what they mean and how to interpret imagery.

And I think in a more official way, I think, than just punching up on a computer or seeing something on a TV commercial or something like that. I think you really need to know how ideas and emotions are expressed through a visual form. Now that for- that form could be video, you know, or film, probably eventually be digital video from a long period-- for a long time to come, but it still has the same rules. And it still has the same vocabulary, and it still has the same grammar, I should say, really the same grammar.

And the grammar is panning left and right, tracking in or out, you know, booming up and down, intercutting a certain way, use of a close-up as opposed to a medium shot. Was is a medium shot? What is a long shot?

All these sort of things and how do you use all of these elements and the different kinds of lighting, and how you use all these elements to make an emotional and psychological point to an audience, and I think we have to begin to teach our younger people how to use this very powerful tool, because we know film, the image, can be so strong for-- not only for good, for good use, but also for bad use. Look at World War II and look at the films that were made in Germany. Look at the great director, Leni Riefenstahl. Look at her "Triumph of the Will" and how that really-- the extraordinary ability she had as a filmmaker that helped shape the policies of the Third Reich, and of course, we know what that lead to.

And so film is very powerful.

The clip above continues to make three more points, all worth watching.

Scorsese is a filmmaker and one of the biggest champions of the feature film form. He started a foundation in the 1980s that restored films, some dating back to the silent era, that were decaying in storage. He started a curriculum for high school students so they could be more "visually literate" and not get manipulated by media. In November, he penned a controversial Opinion column in the New York Times criticizing widely viewed Marvel superhero films as not cinematic.

As viewers of last night's Oscars saw during Bong Joon Ho's acceptance speech for Best Director, filmmakers like Scorsese and Tarantino are sowing legacies by championing lesser-known peers, despite the risks.


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Further Reading:

Nov. 2019: "In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk."   nytimes.com




This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.