A new Mar­tin Scors­ese short film is air­ing this week

While it may be a tempt­ing way to think, the cur­rent pan­dem­ic quag­mire sim­ply can­not be swept away by a sin­gle sav­ior, come to res­cue we des­per­ate help­less human­i­ty with some grand feat. This is now how the world works. But if any­one was going to do some­thing like that, it would prob­a­bly have to be Mar­tin Scors­ese.

And so it is with a sigh of if-only-tem­po­rary relief that we receive today’s news of a new short film from the liv­ing leg­end, pro­duced from his home lock­down in the thick of the Coro­n­avirus. His lat­est work will run on the BBC on Thurs­day 28 May as part of their cri­sis-themed lim­it­ed series Lock­down Cul­ture with Mary Beard.

The short will osten­si­bly mix footage Scors­ese shot in his own home with archival clips from old­er films, judg­ing by Beard’s descrip­tion includ­ed in the Hol­ly­wood Reporter: ​“We see him at home, think­ing about lock­down through the lens of clas­sic movies, like Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man”. Every crit­ic and their cousin has been prep­ping pieces about how this movie or that one speaks to these hec­tic con­di­tions, but per­haps this analy­sis would be best left to the master.

Scorsese’s no stranger to visu­al essays on the poten­cy of cin­e­ma, hav­ing guid­ed view­ers through his expe­ri­ences with the films of Amer­i­ca and Italy in two sprawl­ing, com­pre­hen­sive doc­u­men­taries. His lat­est effort in this vein won’t be quite so in-depth, but it will share his adept­ness at con­nect­ing the dots between our lived lives and what J Hober­man refers to as our ​‘dream-life’ onscreen.

The THR item includes a love­ly quote from Scors­ese him­self: ​“What I look for­ward to in the future is car­ry­ing with me what I have been forced to learn in these cir­cum­stances. It is the essen­tial. The peo­ple you love. Being able to take care of them and be with them as much as you can.”

Scors­ese will share time on the pro­gram with Lee Daniels, who’ll offer his take on how the lock­down could serve as a cre­ative oppor­tu­ni­ty to writ­ers and film­mak­ers, but a new work from Mar­tin Scors­ese is an event all its own. How apro­pos, that such a devout­ly Chris­t­ian film­mak­er would appear to the peo­ple of Earth when his sav­ing is need­ed most.