While discussing Silence, Martin Scorsese confesses to us that there are fewer films or images with anything to say.
Martin Scorsese is one of the legendary directors working today. He’s a filmmaker who stands at the forefront of 35mm and celluloid print’s defense, yet still at the age of 69 manages to make the groundbreaking 3D children’s film, Hugo. His storied career is one of vast experimentation and numerous styles. Sure, he’s best loved for the kinetic energy he brings to stories about debauched criminals, be they on the neighborhood level like Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990), or the white collar skullduggery that The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) drowned in. But he’s also made restrained period pieces like The Age of Innocence (1993) and the classic Hollywood love letter, The Aviator (2004).
Right now, he is releasing a quiet and gingerly paced journey into emotional devastation: Silence. It’s a film about the personal responsibility one has for his faith, and the film’s thematic power is anything but mute.
While promoting the film at a New York press conference, though, Scorsese had a confession of his own to make to the room full of journalists: he’s watching fewer and fewer films, because he thinks cinema, as well as our media culture as a whole, is oversaturated with images, sound, and fury that ultimately signify nothing.
After Adam Driver spoke eloquently about the role of faith in his life, and how culturally we’re so oversaturated and overstimulated that it is harder for people to understand a simple, profoundly held faith, Scorsese agreed and used one of his favorite subject matters as an example: the moving image.
“I think, for me, it’s been a long process, because as Adam says, oversaturation, particularly in our world as it is now, nothing really does have a meaning,” Scorsese said. “The images, for example, cinema used to be in a building or even on television, you’d see a film or whatever.” But now, Scorsese concedes, there is less and less worth watching.
“I must say I don’t see many modern, new ones over the past few years, two or three years. But I stopped, because the images don’t mean anything. We’re just completely saturated with images that don’t mean anything. Words certainly don’t mean anything anymore. They twist them and turn them. So then where is the meaning? Where is the truth?”
The filmmaker compared the situation to how Andrew Garfield’s Father Rodrigues sees his faith tested during the Silence’s third act. With sacrifice, says Scorsese, “He might find the actual truth. It’s a letting go of things.”
Admittedly, Scorsese might have a point about an oversaturation of images and media on our phones, television, and, far too rarely nowadays, movie theater screens. As a consequence, with an abundance of content, much if it more enamored with spectacle instead of story, and it is harder to find things with something to say, particularly in cinema. Nonetheless, I can safely confirm that Silence has a lot on its mind and certainly will leave a meaningful impact, one way or another, if you watch it in a darkened room.
Silence opens in select cities on Dec. 23.