UFO Info Week-End

It was hinted that he might not live long &ndash not just because of his chronic asthma but because like Travis his head

It was hinted that he might not live long – not just because of his chronic asthma but because, like Travis, his head was full of perilous demons. He was the new age, a visionary talent from the rough streets, and so much truer than the older generations of Hollywood cynics.The sickly kid didn’t often play on the streets – his breathing was always at risk. But he observed gang life, the way he paid attention to the movies he was taken to see. In Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, you feel that the director must have known the street dangers personally, but Marty was just recreating the fearful dreams of a kid alarmed by life. One day as a boy he painted huge, bright eyes on the wall of his room “They watch me while I’m sleeping,” he told his mother.

“Don’t say that,” she urged, but he insisted, “Ma, they watch me.”Today is his birthday – he is 60 His eyes are less wild, or naked, now. There is the smoke of irony when he speaks, and his mouth can curl with worldly sarcasm He is well groomed. The slicked-back gun-metal hair matches the smart suits (Italian, no doubt). Marty doesn’t throw money around, but he has become a charcoal dandy – you feel it’s a look he has decided on, as his own character.

He could even be mistaken for a producer.But perhaps it’s more the restrained splendour of a padrone, or a godfather, which would be so much more appropriate. For just as the young Marty was the patron saint of the new cinema – going to New York University to study the art, and then making a series of films that captured the existentialism of the Seventies – so, three decades later, he remains the person most readily identified as the spirit of cinema.It was that insistence, that film was the world, that made Scorsese exemplary among his generation and the legend he is today. You could always tell the film students who wanted to be Steven Spielberg or George Lucas from those who needed to be Marty. The Spielberg approach was about professional glory, but having to be Marty spoke to the passionate necessity of his films. Nothing stood for that on screen better than those three blazing portraits in self-destruction from Robert De Niro, the actor who seemed to have a symbiotic relationship with Marty: Johnny Boy, dazzling but crazy in Mean Streets (1973); Travis Bickle; and Jake La Motta, the paranoid boxer in Raging Bull (1980), beating his head against a wall when he was too old to have other men hurt him.Add a fourth film: New York, New York, where De Niro plays a Stan Getz-like saxophonist in love with the band-singer (Liza Minnelli), but never brave enough to come far enough out of his solitude to admit it. New York, New York is part of the best of Scorsese, and it’s the moment in his life where he was nearly destroyed – by cocaine and his love affair with Liza.

For Marty was indeed once the uninhibited self-destructive he celebrated on screen But the experience of New York .. frightened him, made him draw back. And maybe those bleak eyes have never quite forgiven him for that retreat, not even if he has made it to 60.For his contribution is as passionate as ever. It’s not just that he is still making his own films – pictures he is driven to make, personal statements He spreads himself around to assist the large art of film. Whenever the forlorn task of film preservation comes into focus he is likely to be named to the committee. His enthusiasm for saving the classics is an extension of his life as a collector and viewer. He still knows no entertainment more compelling than sitting up late with the last print of a lost masterpiece.Yet, at a time when lesser mortals are confronting retirement, Scorsese faces a determining moment in his career.