Museum celebrates director Martin Scorsese with retrospective

A morning all to myself in Berlin. What to do? A search of Twitter hashtags directs me to an incredible treat: The

Film Museum at Potsdamer Platz, where a retrospective of the great director Martin Scorsese is up through mid-May.

It’s not scheduled to travel to the States.

Personal memorabilia punctuated with film clips comprise this 600-piece exhibit; the curators were allowed to sift through Scorsese’s archives and extracted many gems.

Included are: A poster from The Simpsons creator Matt Groening titled, “Good Fellowship,” signed,

“To Bart Simpson’s favorite director.” Storyboards from the Dalai Lama biopic

Kundun. Wardrobe sketches for Jodie Foster in

Taxi Driver. A study of the tattoos of

Max Cady in Cape Fear. Letters, beautiful old-fashioned correspondence typed on typewriters, from myriad people, including writer Paul Schrader, for example: “I just saw Kar-Wei’s

Happy Together. He uses a cheap fast color stock which produces very vivid colors, especially reds and yellows. You might want to look.”

You can learn as much about Scorsese in the 1974 documentary he made about his family as you can from dissecting his vast filmography. Or, at least, how his mother made spaghetti sauce. Excerpts of this early work are in the gallery, too.

The director himself didn’t make the opening of what’s billed to be the first retrospective of his work, but he did send along this video message: