Is God watch­ing in all of Mar­tin Scorsese’s films?

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Silence is a film that was near­ly 30 years in the mak­ing. In that time, a pletho­ra of arti­cles and edi­to­r­i­al inves­ti­ga­tions looked at the director’s own faith and how, through the mov­ing image, he was able to per­son­al­ly grap­ple with the abstract con­cept of divinity.

Var­i­ous inter­views with Scors­ese across the decades saw the direc­tor wax­ing nos­tal­gic about his Ital­ian-Amer­i­can Catholic upbring­ing, his plans to become a mis­sion­ary, and lat­er, the feel­ings of doubt and a desire for reli­gious clar­i­ty. Silence brought faith back into his sphere of con­scious­ness, reawak­en­ing the sense that reli­gion has always played a vital part in the director’s work, even the drug-hazed and bul­let-stud­ded gang­ster epics upon which he made his name.

Writ­ten explo­rations of the director’s faith have con­veyed the mes­sage with gus­to, pick­ing out the spir­i­tu­al sym­bol­ism of char­ac­ters like Travis Bick­le in 1976’s Taxi Dri­ver, with his saint-like agen­da to purge his trou­bled mind, or high­light­ing 1988’s The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ as an exam­ple of Scorsese’s obses­sion with reli­gious doubt.

A beau­ti­ful new video essay by free­lance edi­tor Jorge Luen­go Ruiz offers a beau­ti­ful visu­al sum­ma­ry of the sup­posed watch­ful eye of God that per­me­ates the Mar­tin Scorsese’s work. The piece, enti­tled ​‘Mar­tin Scors­ese: God’s Point of View’, is an exem­plary bolt of cinephile analy­sis that cap­i­talis­es on the pow­er and poten­tial of the essay form as a for­mat for broad­er dis­cus­sion and focus on visu­al specifics. Ruiz uses clips from 24 Scors­ese fea­tures as a way to show­case his fre­quent use of the bird’s eye – or God’s eye – shots, the way he (and edi­tor Thel­ma Schoon­mak­er) beat-match the footage to the sound­track, as with Max Richter’s ​‘On the Nature of Day­light’ in Shut­ter Island.

The video engages in a way that a writ­ten exam­i­na­tion of Scorsese’s style can­not nec­es­sar­i­ly achieve, pri­ori­tis­ing image over words to depict a cer­tain hov­er­ing pres­ence that’s hard to amply describe. It presents a range of scenes and char­ac­ters, from Bill the Butch­er sharp­en­ing knives in 19^th cen­tu­ry crime dra­ma Gangs of New York to Jake La Mot­ta in the ring in box­ing clas­sic Rag­ing Bull, with each one shot from above, like or a moral voice, to look down on.

In the descrip­tion Ruiz lists his sources and asks a sin­gle ques­tion: is God watch­ing in all of Scorsese’s films? The ques­tion is not an overt­ly click­bait attempt at being con­tro­ver­sial or rev­o­lu­tion­ary – there is no sug­ges­tion of an absolute final answer, but mere­ly an astute aware­ness of a recur­ring metaphor­i­cal motif. Pay­ing atten­tion to these small fea­tures is an inter­est­ing and unique mode of admi­ra­tion and encour­ages active, thought­ful audi­ence participation.

Ruiz does not nar­rate the video. Instead, he allows the images to speak for them­selves. This proves to be the most enjoy­able aspect of his cre­ation. Harun Faroc­ki, the late Ger­man film­mak­er and pio­neer of non-nar­ra­tive essays, saw his own work as, ​“images com­ment­ing on images” and this is exact­ly what Ruiz has achieved here. Too often the mak­ers of visu­al essays nar­rate over the mate­r­i­al they are exam­in­ing, offer­ing a sub­jec­tive read­ing of the mate­r­i­al rather than some­thing which is open to the poet­ry of interpretation.

By allow­ing the images to breath on their own, this video leaves room for per­son­al con­tem­pla­tion is left open. ​‘Is God watch­ing?’ remains just a ques­tion, a way of invit­ing thoughts on why Scors­ese is so fond of that par­tic­u­lar, top-down cam­era angle. Whether it’s inten­tion­al­ly sug­ges­tive of some­thing holy or sim­ply an cos­met­ic choice remains up for debate, but as a com­pan­ion piece to Scorsese’s own fea­ture work, it pro­vides new ways of look­ing at cin­e­ma. It inspires oth­ers to start notic­ing intrigu­ing idiosyncrasies.