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The Last Waltz was a revolutionary documentary. It was the first concert movie shot in 35 mm, the record of a celebration of the Band’s last concert on the site of their first show as The Band. It is the visual evidence that more than thirty years ago Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel had the good sense to go out on top. There are many examples of actors, politicians, athletes and rock stars who didn’t. The movie itself, I hour, 37 minutes, was directed by Martin Scorsese. No matter what you think of Hollywood, his credentials as a director are undisputed. His list of credits, accomplishments and awards means that Scorsese is a serious director, not one to waste energy. At the time, 1976, a time when the underground half of the 60's generation was realizing that the other half was following in the footsteps of their parents, embracing the values that their governments, their elders and betters, praised and promoted, Scorsese was in the middle of directing NEW YORK, NEW YORK, a huge, expensive Hollywood project. Unbeknownst to the New York, New York producer who would have had a heart attack if he’d known, Marty (as he is referred to by almost everyone in the movie) took a weekend off, filmed the concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, put together the rest of it in a week and filmed three more songs on a Hollywood sound stage a few months later. It was edited and released in 1978. The sets, lighting, photography, sound and all the myriad details that go into movie creation were taken care of by hook or by crook, often improvised by world renowned experts in their fields. The project took on a life of its own. It was not made for profit and grew into an important cultural event. Before Scorsese made The Last Waltz, there was WOODSTOCK (where he worked as an assistant director and editor and learned what not to do), GIMME SHELTER, SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL and an Elvis film, but no other single concert had been as carefully choreographed, as meticulously set and photographed as this. There were seven cameras shooting at times, each run by a professional and, in many cases, a world famous cinematographer. Bill Graham’s lawyers forced Scorsese’s assistant to negotiate each camera movement because he controlled the stage and insisted that nothing impair the sight lines of the live audience. It is best to mention here that the DVD of The Last Waltz is available cheap at your local DVD purveyor. This one only cost ten Canadian dollars to buy, a great bargain for musicians, writers and anyone else interested in rock ‘n roll and the making of movies. The “Special Features” additions on the DVD contain a lot of comical and serious comments by the movie makers, Mac Rebenak, Ronnie Hawkins, Mavis Staples and the band members which can be listened to as the movie plays. As each band member, song and guest performer appears, someone talks about them. The story of The Band’s creation and growth through sixteen years of living on the road unfolds through a series of interviews with band members interspersed among the songs, mostly answers to questions posed by Scorsese himself, questions provided by a professional screenwriter. Many of the answers are funny, some ironic, some poignant, but one feeling permeates the whole movie, a sort of good natured humour, an amused observation of the world at large and a sincere appreciation of the music. The Band were aware that the odds of survival for such a long time in such a high risk lifestyle, were against them. Robbie Robertson says, at the end of the movie, “The road has taken some of the great ones” and “You can push your luck”. Three of the Band’s songs were filmed on an MGM sound stage where Scorsese could control everything and was free to use a crane and a camera as in normal movies. The Weight, in which Pop and Mavis Staples sing verses and all four harmonize on the choruses with members of the band, Evangeline, which is filmed in stunning colour with Emmy Lou Harris doing an achingly sweet call an

By Robert Kolker

“That’s that,” quoting Ace Rothstein at the end of Casino. I didn’t end the Martin Scorsese chapter on an optimistic note in the fourth edition of A Cinema of Loneliness. There is more than a hint that the Scorsese’s creative energies might be flagging.

My pessimism grew from the direction — or lack of direction — Scorsese’s films had taken over the past decade. I thought that the big productions of the 2000s — Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed — indicated some kind of flailing about for ideas. These films were not as lean and mean as the earlier gangster movies that worked at the speed of light and were deliriously comic in their basic brutality.

Copyright Paramount Pictures. Source: shutterisland.com.

Shutter Island seemed to seal the decline. An unofficial remake of Samuel Fuller’s 1963 Shock Corridor, the film could have been made, I thought, by anyone. It bore none of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style and all of the hallmarks of an overwrought Hollywood gothic tale.

An obvious riposte to my pessimism is that I am not in a position to question an artist’s evolution. Scorsese no more than any other filmmaker is bound to repeat himself, and the great gangster and street films of his early period are a thing of the past. Artists change with time, and the results of that change may not be to everyone’s taste. At least not to mine.

With this in mind, I went to see Hugo with a lot of skepticism. Why would Scorsese make a film in 3D? The only reason I could come up with — aside from the fact that he might just wish to experiment with the old/new screen technology of the moment — is that Alfred Hitchcock made a 3D film when that format was first introduced in the 1950s: Dial M For Murder. Scorsese almost always roots his work in films of the past. His imagination is constructed of film. He is an amateur archivist, with a huge collection of movies that he watches continually. He has his cast and crew look at old movies when they are preparing a new one. His films become something of archival works themselves, full of allusions to their predecessors. But there is more to it than this.

I have resisted the recent 3D craze. I did go to see Avatar out of curiosity. James Cameron does not often repay curiosity. But something stood out in that film. The mise-en-scène of Cameron’s mythical world, with its floating vegetation in a liquid like atmosphere, reminded me of the underwater sequences of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902). This magical film — Méliès was a magician as well as a filmmaker — was just one entry into his enormous filmography of fantasy filmmaking, his counter to the