Written by 最后的尼采（转载注明）
In Hollywood such a circle full of artistic bubbles there’s a director living in this way: Working for over 30 years, has never really shot a movie for pure commercial motive as what Spielberg and Lucas did among his generation. He is uncompromised for gangster genre which originally came from his childhood living in Queens, New York, which is Italian mafia’s domain famous in Godfather. Some of his movies like Goodfellas and Departed can be regarded as a salute to Francis Ford Coppola, while remains their own style: grassroots gangsters’ stories, dialogues with slang and dirty words, soft light use compared with hard darkness in Godfather. He is good at discovered greed in humanity and social darkness by a kind of cruel calmness, as in a bar with gags and jokes, faint yellow environment, soft light music, and sudden gunshot (along with the music turns to old fashion rock).
Dialogue is the soul of his film. It directly tells us good stories by actors’ tongues. It seems just to come out of scriptwriter's mind and jumps from actors' mouths, while each of the words should has been carefully designed. Take Departed for example: an interesting scene taking in meeting room of state-trooper station between Sergeant Dignam, second command of the undercover unit (acted by Mark Wahlberg) and Captain Ellerby, the command of SIU (fat guy acted by Alec Baldwin):
“Staff Sergeant Dignam is our liaison to the undercover section. His undercover work is extensive. He’s here to give us his report. Sergeant Dignam.”
“Okay, my people are out there. They’re like f_cking Indians. You’re not gonna see them. You’ll not hear about them through me or Captain Queenan. You will not Ever know the identity of undercover people. Unfortunately this shithole has more leaks than the Iraqi navy.”
“F_ck yourself.”
“I’m tired from f_cking your wife.”
“How’s your mother?”
“Good, she’s tired from f_cking with my father…”
This short dialogue has almost done the job of a series of moving images to describe character’s disposition, which is principled, distain of stupid, sticking on what is right in his mind – a fractious justice image has been preliminarily drawn. The little oral conflict implies the future trouble between the two departments. Dialogue of Scorsese’s films is a vane of plots.
Editing is another typical point of his films. Scorsese is an expert of freeze-frame. From Goodfellas, in while our hero Henry Hill tells his childhood in a reverse order, the scene he beaten by his father being stopped by his mother is frozen, while the aside continues. This measure strengthens the emotion and reason to the cause of being gangster, as suffering a terrible childhood. As we can see both freeze-frame and slang dialogues are more comparatively simple ways to present important points of plots, than moving coherent images, but more efficient. Scorsese knows where to freeze and how to freeze in particular frames and when to use and how to use bad words to present characteristics. Montage is less used in his films, while also making good effects. Scorsese is good at telling life-long stories and choosing the key points. For compressing unwanted plots, he uses direct cut, for example links a boy’s face on the first frame, with the face grown up of the same expression on the second frame, as seen in Departed of Sergeant Sullivan. This is really succinct and never out of time.
The style of his stories is realistic, for this aim he generally use soft common light, ordinary gutter neighborhood to be his Mise-en-scene, which is not very complicated, but also carefully chosen. All above are good examples for learning to be a good story-teller.
