Slow motion and freeze frame
Two Scorsese signatures: slowed-down images and frames frozen on screen.
Slow motion and freeze frames are among the best-known techniques of Martin Scorsese. He used slow motion in Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967) and Mean Streets (1973), and freeze frames in the opening credits of The King of Comedy, throughout Goodfellas (1990), and in Casino (1995), The Departed (2006) and The Irishman (2019).
Quick Facts
- Slow motion
- Who's That Knocking at My Door
- Mean Streets
- Taxi Driver
- Raging Bull
- Casino
- Freeze frames
- The King of Comedy
- Goodfellas
- Casino
- The Departed
- The Irishman
- First seen
- Mean Streets (1973), per his biography
Facts from the source article.
Background
His blonde leading ladies are typically seen through the protagonist's eyes as angelic figures: they wear white in their first scene and are filmed in slow motion, as with Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver, Cathy Moriarty in a white bikini in Raging Bull and Sharon Stone in a white minidress in Casino, possibly a nod to Alfred Hitchcock. In Goodfellas Scorsese used freeze frames to show that 'a point was being reached' in Henry Hill's life. Slow motion also carries key images elsewhere: the jeering crowd at the crucifixion in The Last Temptation of Christ, inspired by a Hieronymus Bosch painting, and Sam Rothstein's car bomb in Casino, where he hangs above the flames like a soul bound for hell. Slow-motion flashbulbs with accented camera and shutter sounds recur across his films.
More in Signature Techniques & Style
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