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Chapter 6 - Mean Streets as Heritage Object: Music, Nostalgia and the Museumification of Martin Scorsese

from Part I - MEMORY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2019

By
Amanda Howell
Edited by
Lauren Istvandity ,
Sarah Baker  and
Zelmarie Cantillon
Amanda Howell
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University
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Summary

The SCORSESE exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (May–September 2016) combined film excerpts and film-related artefacts with pieces of personal memorabilia drawn from the collections of director Martin Scorsese and his frequent collaborator Robert de Niro. Conceived and organized by the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum für Film und Fernsehen in Berlin, Germany, in collaboration with EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, the design of the exhibition was deliberately non-linear and nonchronological, organized instead by themes (such as Family and New York) and film-making categories (such as Cinematography and Editing), which blurred the lines between Scorsese's life, cinephilia and cinematic productions. One of its categories was Music. A featured object in this part of the exhibition was a box of 45s from his childhood home. In the audio guide for the exhibit, Scorsese discusses the record collection and memories from his youth combined with his recollection of the role played by these records in his films:

The key was then collecting the 45s. Eventually, because we were only in three rooms, they had to be placed somewhere, and I got this box. This is the first box that I kept my 45s in. And I had to find an index –I had to make an index –so I typed it up myself. […] The Aquatones, You, was one of my favorites. We used that in Mean Streets. Desiree by the Charts was my favorite of that type of doo wop. And it's the blending here of popular music –Johnny Mathis –with the influx of rock n roll –of course, Fats Domino. And then country and western rock ‘n’ roll like the Everly Brothers and Dale Hawkins. […] Mean Streets –pretty much all the tracks come from this box –or maybe another box there [at home], too –somewhere –but I must say, the actual 45s we used with scratches and all. This music for me was how I saw the world. I mean looking out from my window. Or I'd be walking in the street and something would be playing and it was usually in counterpoint to what was going on in this spectacle on the street. (Scorsese 2016)

Type
Chapter
Information
Remembering Popular Music's Past
Memory-Heritage-History
 , pp. 69 - 82
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2019

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