The camera zooms out from this divine allusion and moves along the street before zooming in on J.R. The film cuts to a shot of a market a woman inside gets food ready – a direct callback to the “divine” connection generated in the first scene in the film between the image of the cooking woman and the Virgin Mary. The distance between “good” and “bad” is rendered spatially as the camera zooms out from the image of the woman who cooks to the image of the fighters. (Harvey Keitel) and Joey (Lennard Kuras). The camera zooms and reveals this duo is J.R. The seeds for the primary conflict have just been sown. His opening neatly juxtaposes the ideas of the divine and the profane, a dichotomy that’s been ever-present in his work since. The camera tracks on one of them and neatly captures the brawl in one smooth movement while the film cuts to the other scuffle happening in a proximate location before cutting back to the earlier tracking shot which now showcases the two fights in the same frame, one in the background and one in the foreground.Īmong all this chaos, the title card drops and signifies the arrival of a brazen new cinematic voice (at the time), that of director Martin Scorsese. The radio begins to play a rock song proper, “Jenny Take a Ride” by Mitch Ryder, as opposed to just an instrumental like the previous scene, and two fights among the groups begin to break out. Part of his entourage, Joey (Lennard Kuras), the person holding the weapon, waits for his opponent, a man from another group who stands across from him, to get ready. The editing pattern also shifts this time the camera cuts three separate times, starting from a wide shot before eventually cutting to a single shot of a young man, J.R. The drum-beat is replaced by the sounds of a radio.

Immediately, this divine motherhood is contrasted with the next scene which starts with a weapon held behind a back – a symbol of violence. This is Scorsese’s arrival and it’s replete with what he’s best known for. In opposition to the Edenic opening, the next scene embraces sin as a fight breaks out to rock-and-roll music. The camera tracks as one fight occurs in the background and one happens in the foreground.

(Harvey Keitel), Joey (Lennard Kuras), and the rest of the gang wait. The holy aspects of Mary become imbued in the woman, and the scene ends with the latter feeding a large group of kids as Mary looks on – the connection between the image of the “mother” and the divine has been cemented. First, simple cuts jump between the two of them, but as the drum beat continues, the film utilizes dissolves to cement the duo into a unified entity. These figures – the older woman and the Virgin Mary – will continue to be juxtaposed in aggressive fashion as the sequence continues. The film opens with an energetic drum-beat on an image of the Virgin Mary in the foreground and a mirror showcasing an older woman cooking in the background. Rapid edits and dissolves tie the image of the mother together with Virgin Mary women as a stand-in for divinity is established. The woman (Catherine Scorsese) dissolves into the Virgin Mary. The woman (Catherine Scorsese) serves the food to kids. The Virgin Mary dissolves in the cooking. An older woman (Catherine Scorsese) cooks.

An older woman (Catherine Scorsese) cooks while the Virgin Mary “watches”.

Whos that knocking at my door