Martin Scorsese’s Zoom call to the world is a marvellous coup for Mary Beard’s BBC Lockdown Culture special: a personal short film shot on his smartphone – sometimes artlessly in portrait mode, sometimes giving it a clockwise quarter-turn for the more professional landscape format. (He does seem to be holding the phone himself.)
It is a brief, intense, ruminative snapshot about his life in his New York apartment during the lockdown. We see Scorsese brooding on his house arrest. At some moments, his face looks very glum, as if perennially struck afresh with the novelty of what is happening, the fact that there is no end in sight, and the impossibility of coming to terms with it until there is. Occasionally his face will be lit up with a smile that makes him look decades younger. We get tantalising glimpses of bookshelves, family photos, and what is conceivably an east Asian carved figure (something from his movie Kundun perhaps? Or maybe Silence?)
And of course Scorsese gives us a couple of movie clips: Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, which allows us to reflect on the nature of wrongful imprisonment, and Scorsese playfully lets the background music from this continue under what he is saying. There is also Siodmak’s The Killers, which shows us Burt Lancaster and the other prisoners looking out through the bars and gazing at the stars, which one of them has learning about with a book from the prison library. Has their lockdown has given them an insight into the universe? (It’s impossible to watch this without remembering some of Scorsese’s own great prison scenes: Jake LaMotta pounding the walls of his cell in Raging Bull, Paulie savouring his cuisine in GoodFellas, the ageing Russell playing bowls in The Irishman. Scorsese looks more thoughtful than any of them.)
And of course being over 70, he is shielding. He is vulnerable. For me the impact of this little film is that it really brought that fact home to me for the first time. I think of him as a dynamic force in the movies, which of course he is. But he is also a human being and I loved his honesty and insight about the fact that when the lockdown first hit he was just relieved. He could step off the treadmill for a little, simply take a break from the demanding schedule.
But now that novelty is wearing off. You can see Scorsese straining to get back to work, you can a little hint of that mega-espresso livewire jittery energy starting to kick back in. But it’s co-existing with what looks like a new reflection on mortality. Scorsese ponders his final meeting with the late Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami, and what Kiarostami told him about the unreliability of time. There’s never enough of it. Even when you’re on your own, and it seems like time is all you have.
• Mary Beard’s Lockdown Culture is on BBC iPlayer until 26 June.
