6 - Coppola and Scorsese: Authorial Views

Summary

Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese began their careers in the 1960s and have since been among the most important innovators of the cinematic transition of the late 1970s and 1980s. Their work, which is varied in style and content, nonetheless demonstrates a number of core characteristics essential to expanding the present discussion. In a significant number of films, these directors do not so much incorporate the simulacral image, as comment on it, and they not only resuscitate past genric forms, but radically displace their elements.

Coppola's work has been strongly dependent on genre from his earliest productions. These include the “nudie” picture Tonight for Sure (1962), his horror film Dementia 13 (1963) for Roger Corman, the musical Finian's Rainbow (1968) for MGM, and his screenplay for the war movie Patton (1970). It is only with The Conversation (1973), The Godfather (1972), and The Godfather Part II (1974), however, that Coppola enters into a critical reworking of genre. In these three films the conventions for the detective and gangster genres, respectively, are reused with an acknowledgment of their lost past. In The Conversation, for example, Harry Caul is a detective quite unlike his film predecessors in that he cannot successfully decipher the world around him. Harry is instead confronted with an impenetrable system of corporate power and crime that depletes his ability to see or hear the whole truth.