Beginning in January of the new year, the Gazette and the Regent come together to launch a Books on Film Club, our twist on a much-loved contemporary institution, the Book Club.

Inspired by the Regent’s recent announcement of a film festival devoted to adaptation across every possible genre, this series explores books on film. The Books on Film Club is open to every kind of literary work — novels always come to mind, but memoirs, cookbooks, short stories, even magazine articles and newspaper stories have all inspired great films. Sometimes the book is better than the film — and occasionally the reverse is the case. We have selected a series of books on film with an eye to excellence in both genres — memorable writing leading to a standout film.

Films will be screened at the Regent mid-month across the winter months on Monday nights. Toward the end of every month, on Thursday evenings, the Books on Film Club will meet at the Gazette building to discuss book, film, or both over a glass of wine or two and something good to eat.

(Jed Tallo/Gazette Staff)

The series opens with Martin Scorsese’s 1993 blockbuster, The Age of Innocence, screened at The Regent, paired with Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel. February sees Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia, a film that engages two books, Julia Child’s My Life in France, and Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia. In March, we go global: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and director Deepa Mehta’s film adaptation. Following the lead, and the success, of the ThriveMinds Book Club, all selected books will be available at the Library, and at Books and Company at a discount, where Books on Film Club passes can also be purchased.

Passes cover each month’s film and book club gathering and will be sold individually (for $50 each) or as a set of three ($125) for the whole series from January to March. Passes are also available at the Gazette offices and at the Regent. Each pass covers the film, the book club, and food and wine for the book club evening. We imagine a kind of literary salon and social gathering to warm the winter evenings, our hearts and our minds. Please come!

Featured Director: Martin Scorsese

To accompany the Books on Film Club, the Gazette offers a series of brief discussions of featured films, directors, books, and authors in its Culture pages.

The Regent screens Martin Scorsese’s much acclaimed 2023 western Killers of the Flower Moon this week. The film adapts journalist David Grann’s 2017 true crime story, Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Nation and the birth of the FBI. Meanwhile, the Books on Film club opens with Scorsese’s Age of Innocence in January. In what follows, Chris Fanning looks into Scorsese’s filmography.

My knowledge of Martin Scorsese’s movies is firmly based in the 1980s. My first was Raging Bull (1980). There’s no way I could have seen it when it first came out. The intensity of its unexplained, yet carefully choreographed violence would have been too much for a twelve-year-old. I know I saw it on the big screen, for I am paralysed by the memory of being in the ring with Robert Deniro’s brutal and inaccessible boxer, Jake LaMotta. Whenever that was, I know that I have not been able to watch it since.

Scorsese began producing major movies, like Taxi Driver (1976), in the last era of a Hollywood marketing system still willing to invest in what we now call “art film.” One American version of the “art film” took up the tradition of the Western, in particular its engagement with a hyper-realism focused on violence — as in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1972). Popular films like Midnight Cowboy (1969) and even Jaws (1975) created a genre called “gritty realism” that was highly stylized.

The fight scenes in Raging Bull feature slow-motion closeups, point-of-view shots, balletic spatterings of blood, and are soundtracked, not to music, but to the magnified sounds of punches landing on flesh, a radio announcer, and horrified screaming from the audience. These scenes might, in fact, be the origin of the now-familiar stylized violence of today’s movies, made ironic by Quentin Tarantino, or antiseptically distanced by computer animation.

The senselessness of Jake LaMotta’s pyrrhic victory — “you never took me down,” he exclaims, as his competitor is crowned champion — is never explained by the film. It is baffling and unsettling.

At the time, Scorsese thought that Raging Bull might be his last film. History has proven otherwise, and, now in his 80s, he has experienced a creative renaissance, and developed a popular and accessible style — hard-earned through work in many genres, including the dark satire of The King of Comedy (1983; another of his frequent collaborations with DeNiro), a Michael Jackson video (“Bad,” 1987), and a controversial adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). I remember having to cross a line of religious protesters to see this film in a theatre.

After this early and intense decade, Scorsese’s long career balances the accessible with attention to aesthetics. Goodfellas (1990) secured his status as major director. The elements of gangster life that hovered at the edges of Raging Bull come front and centre. Violence remains a theme, as it does in his gangster follow-up, Casino (1995). Controversial depictions of violence against women feature in Cape Fear (1991).

The 1993 Age of Innocence represents Scorsese’s first real departure from gangster violence and genre films.

An adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel of the same name, and set in late nineteenth-century New York, the film is marked by Scorsese’s trademark emphasis on direction, on pointing the viewer’s gaze in unsettling ways. The film’s opening scene, set in a ballroom, has been compared to the fight scene in Raging Bull. Both offer a ballet of camera moves. The film tracks the violence of high society in an adaptation of Wharton’s vivid critique of lives sacrificed to silk. Scorsese meets Wharton: a fascinating combination.