A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

This is Martin Scorsese's scholarly, yet highly idiosyncratic, contribution to the British Film Institute's "Century of Cinema" series. Illustrious filmmakers from around the world were commissioned by the series to create documentaries about the history of their country's cinema. Scorsese concentrates on the esoteric and the obscure, purposely omitting the standard Hollywood classics in order to focus on lesser known films and directors.

In a section called "The Director's Dilemma," Scorsese ruminates on the eternal struggle between art and commerce, with clips from THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952), and explains how some directors circumvented the studio system...