Let’s take a look at Martin Scorsese’s documentary My Voyage To Italy – the legendary director’s love letter to Italian cinema. Although Scorsese is best known for his gangster movies like Goodfellas and Gangs Of New York, his documentaries are some of his best work. Scorsese has directed many documentaries over his career, with a few of them focusing on musical figures like No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, George Harrison: Living In The Material World or The Last Waltz – a concert documentary about rock group The Band.
In 1995, Martin Scorsese co-directed A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies which was an almost four-hour long documentary covering American cinema from the silent era right up to the late 1960s and how it impacted his filmmaking career. His 1999 documentary My Voyage To Italy is a companion piece of sorts but with a focus on post-war Italian cinema and its neorealist period. More than that, My Voyage To Italy is Scorsese’s love letter to the Italian films he watched growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in New York’s Little Italy. Clocking in at just over four hours this doc is a passionate homage to an influential cinematic period that shaped his love of films and moviemaking.
My Voyage To Italy pays particular tribute to five greats of Italian cinema – Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Scorsese presents over 30 different films from those directors and examines their influence on both world cinema and his own career. Among the films featured are Rossellini’s Voyage To Italy (1954), from which Scorsese’s documentary gets its name. Starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, Rossellini’s film was initially a critical failure but later re-evaluated as a classic and a major influence on the French New Wave.
Other films covered in My Voyage To Italy include Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962) which Scorsese describes as a bold move forward in cinematic storytelling and Fellini’s 1953 film I Vitelloni. Not only was I Vitelloni a major influence on Scorsese’s third feature film Mean Streets, but it also shaped several other critically acclaimed American films like George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Barry Levinson’s Diner.
My Voyage To Italy is proof of not just the impact Italian cinema has had on Martin Scorsese’s work but filmmaking as a whole. And, as a sprawling journey through some of its most important films, My Voyage To Italy is an informative introduction to 20th-century Italian cinema.
Next: The Irishman Release Date: When Scorsese’s Netflix Movie (Probably) Drops
