A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) on Netflix

Plot summary

Martin Scorsese speaks about the American movies he admires, sitting before the camera between long stretches of clips. He sorts the filmmakers into roles he finds in their work: the storyteller, the illusionist who invented new editing techniques and illusions, the smuggler who tucked subversive ideas into studio pictures, and the iconoclast who attacked social convention. Westerns, gangster films and musicals come under review, and so do directors from the silent era to the 1960s. The account begins with silent masters such as D. W. Griffith and ends in 1969, the year Scorsese began making films of his own, since he prefers not to comment on himself or his contemporaries.