I’m a public health doctor by profession, and although I spent half my career as an academic and delivered an awful lot of lectures, I have no formal education or teaching experience in film; just a lifelong love of cinema. I think that love was nurtured by my dad, who began his own love affair with the silver screen as a panini delivery boy to the cinemas in post-war Naples. He was that kid in Cinema Paradiso. As an 11 year old he watched ‘Blood and Sand’ 38 times and fell in love with Rita Hayworth, an infatuation I was later to inherit. We would watch classic movies on the TV in the 60s and 70s, but the baton was well and truly passed to me when at age 11 my dad took me to see my first ‘grown up’ movie at the cinema, Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Spartacus’, and I experienced the full force of cinema’s power to overawe, thrill, and move. My love affair blossomed four years later when one of my ‘posh’ mates at school used his parents’ BFI memberships (NFT as it was then) to get us into a screening of Howard Hawks’ ‘His Girl Friday’. To sit in a packed auditorium, watching a 1930s black and white movie that had the audience (and me) roaring with laughter, was a total revelation.
Since then, I’ve attended many courses at the BFI, the Tyneside in Newcastle, and even Robert McKee’s legendary three day screenwriting masterclass that has won attendees over 100 academy awards and Pulitzer Prizes (myself not included). Most were brilliant, all were educational, even if only on how not to run a film course.
I certainly don’t pretend to be an experienced film lecturer, but over eight weekly 90 minute sessions, I’d like to take you on a journey where together we can explore the career and work of Martin Scorsese. We’ll begin with the formative childhood experiences that created the obsessions and passions that have driven him throughout his career, and explore how they have become the subjects of his very personal body of work. We’ll move chronologically through his career, and in each session, we’ll focus on two key films in each decade: