A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is a four-hour documentary film in which Scorsese examines a selection of his favorite American films grouped according to three different types of directors: the director as an illusionist: D.W. Griffith or F. W. Murnau, who created new editing techniques among other innovations that made the appearance of sound and color possible later on, the director as a smuggler - filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller, and Vincente Minelli, who used to hide subversive messages in their films and the director as an iconoclast, those filmmakers attacking social conventionalism — Charles Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Sam Peckinpah.