The Way of the Future: The Connections Between Martin Scorsese’s ‘Raging Bull’ and ‘The Aviator’

Martin Scorsese’s latest film Silence reportedly continues the thematic thread of faith that began with The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and continued with Kundun (1997). Looking back at the auteur’s career (now nearly half a century long), it’s easy to identify a number of recurring fixations and impulses. The director has always shown expertise at representing subject experience through form (from the unharnessed camera movement and woozy voice-over of Mean Streets [1973] to the hyper-discordant editing of The Wolf of Wall Street [2013]). Scorsese rarely employs a shot or a cut simply for the purpose of documentation or function, focusing much more instead on the connection between technique and subject. That the director’s technique so often draws in a tapestry of endless music cues (e.g. GoodFellas [1990] and Casino [1995]) or period details (e.g. The Age of Innocence [1993] and Gangs of New York [2002]) speaks to the ways in…