Comment on Martin Scorsese fuses his passions in 'Silence'

NEW YORK - Martin Scorsese's Manhattan office, in a midtown building a few blocks northwest of the cordoned-off Trump Tower, may be the most concentrated bastion of reverence for cinema on the face of the earth. There's a small screening room where Scorsese screens early cuts of his films and classic movies for his daughter and his friends. [...] there are editing suites, including the one where Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker regularly toil with a monitor dedicated to the continuous, muted playing of Turner Classic Movies. "Silence" is a solemn, religious epic about Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver) in a violently anti-Catholic 17th century Japan. Few today are making movies with the scope and ambition of "Silence" - a fact, he grants, that makes him feel like one of the last of a dying breed in today's film industry. Scorsese points to the proliferation of images and the overreliance on superficial techniques as trends that have diminished the power of cinema to younger audiences. Scorsese's comments echo a tender letter he wrote his daughter two years ago The future of movies, he believes, is in the freedom that technology has yielded for anyone to make a movie. 'Vinyl' we tried, but we found that the atmosphere for the type of picture we wanted to make - the nature of the language, the drugs, the sex, depicting the rock 'n' roll world of the '70s - we got a lot of resistance. [...] I don't know about that freedom. Since the election of Donald Trump, some have expressed hope for a return to the kind of '70s filmmaking Scorsese is synonymous with.