A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is a four-hour documentary film presented by Martin Scorsese and produced by the British Film Institute. In the film Scorsese examines a selection of his favorite American films grouped according to three different types of directors: the director as an illusionist: D.W. Griffith or F. W. Murnau, who created new editing techniques among other innovations that made the appearance of sound and color possible later on, the director as a smuggler - filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller, and Vincente Minnelli, who used to... hide subversive messages in their films and the director as an iconoclast, those filmmakers attacking social conventionalism — Charles Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Sam Peckinpah. The documentary was originally shown in three parts on Channel 4 in the UK in 1995.
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