Way Down East (1920)

What’s most intriguing about Scorsese’s glass of water is that it’s capable of allowing in films from the traditional cinema, such as those of Méliès or Safety Last , without infecting them with its bug of digi-artifice: Harold Lloyd dangling precariously above the streets from the hand of a clock remains terrifying, while the same stunt repeated later by Asa Butterfield is nothing more than an exercise in 1’s and 0’s, just as the constant digital snow and breath can never make one think of the cold (compare, for example, with the ice floes of Way Down East ).