Martin Scorsese is a great example of an Auteur. We see the same thematic consistencies throughout his entire body of work. Catholicism, redemption, and the virgin/whore conflict appear in almost all of his work. Scorsese's cinematography is very similar in all of his movies, you can almost tell a Scorsese film just by the way the scenes are shot. We also see the same group of actors in pretty much all of his work, such as Robert Deniro, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel. The best way to take an auteur approach to Scorses's film is to compare a few of them. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver , and Raging Bul are perfect for this type of approach.
Scorsese has his own visual style that is like no one else has. All three of the movies being analyzed for this paper take place in New York City. Mean Streets and Raging Bull take place in Italian-American neighborhoods, and there is some aspect of the mafia in these movies. However Taxi Driver is set in a culturally diverse neighborhood, that if filled with prostitutes and drugs.
In Mean Streets we see a small group of characters, who spend their time fighting, drinking, womanizing, and hustling. The settings for the scenes in this movie are all places of transition, such as bars, stairways, and the streets. This gives us the feel that these guys don't stop. They are always on the move or up to something. Robert DeNiro plays the main character, of Charlie in this movie,.
In Taxi Driver, Scorsese tries to portray a filthy setting. This movie takes place in the prostitute and drug filled streets of Manhattan, mostly shot at night and shot from a first person view. The person whose eyes we see these shots through are the main character's, Travis Bickle, played by Robert DeNiro. We see what Travis Bickle sees from the view of his moving cab. We also see what is going on how Travis sees it. Travis describes the streets he drives around in as "a dark filthy landscape of whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, and, junkies.
