SOURCE: "The Sacraments of Genre: Coppola, DePalma, Scorsese," in Film Quarterly, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, Spring, 1986, pp. 17-28.

Braudy is an American critic and educator who specializes in film history and film theory. In the following excerpt from an essay in which he compares the works of Italian-American directors Francis Ford Coppola, Brian DePalma, and Martin Scorsese with those of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio DeSica, and other Italian neorealists, he examines the ways in which Scorsese reworks genre conventions in order to examine the nature of success and to question his own authority as director.

"An aesthetic of reality," André Bazin called the Italian neorealist films of the immediate postwar period, and the description has stuck. Whatever the changes in style and approach that directors like Rossellini, DeSica, Antonioni, and Fellini made later in their careers, there is still a critical tendency to root them in a film-making that stayed...