FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 07 2001
Masters passed
BY DALYA ALBERGE
Martin Scorsese says interest in classic films is dying
The Oscar-winning[1] film director Martin Scorsese is alarmed that young people, including film-makers, are not watching the classics of cinema history.
At the Venice Film Festival, which ends this Saturday, he warned that a lack of interest in learning from the old masters will lead to a deterioration in standards of film-making and the loss of historic reels because of this indifferent attitude.
Scorsese, one of the industry’s most revered film-makers, is urging the next generation to be aware of its heritage: "To work without it is almost to work in a vacuum, culturally and historically," he said.
"They are missing out on emotional and intellectual stimulation. Although moviegoing remains the number one leisure activity for teenagers, many have never seen a classic movie. And without a knowledge of film history, there may be a dwindling interest in preserving it."
Scorsese, whose films include Taxi Driver, starring Robert De Niro in a tour-de-force role as the unstable Vietnam veteran-turned-vigilante, and GoodFellas, which captured the tawdry, daily details of life on the fringes of the Mob, recalled watching the classics in his youth.
Films such as Bicycle Thieves "marked me for life", he said of Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic about the search for a stolen bike.
Scorsese is spearheading a campaign to promote the importance of preserving historic films before the combustible material on which they were made is lost forever.
Already, 90 per cent of films made before 1920 and half of the 21,000 shorts and feature films shot before 1950 have perished. Much historic footage was destroyed by the studios themselves for safety reasons.
Old stock was composed of silver cellulose nitrate, and films made before 1950 possess properties that are similar to those of gunpowder. As the material ages, it breaks down, turns to jelly or dust, and can explode. That is not to mention the problem of colour fading into pink obscurity, scratches, brittleness and tearing.
One of Scorsese’s greatest regrets is never having had the chance to see the original version of Orson Welles’s 1942 masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons, which is among significant movies that have been irretrievably lost.
Other major losses include Remodelling Her Husband (1920), the only film directed by the great actress Lillian Gish, and Little Red Riding Hood, a 1922 cartoon made by Walt Disney before he found fame and fortune in Hollywood.
Scorsese interrupted work on his latest film, The Gangs of New York, to fly to the festival and champion the cause. His passion for film preservation dates back years. In 1990, along with seven eminent directors including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, he founded a film foundation which has raised more than $4 million (£2.75 million) for various archives that preserve reels from the early days of cinema. Scorsese hopes that a cultural exchange between the US and Italy will be followed by exchanges with other countries, including Britain.
But film preservation is a relatively new field, and there is a shortage of skilled technicians for such specialised work. Scorsese is concerned about preserving not only feature films but newsreels, documentaries and home movies.
Part of the problem, as ever, is money. A typical black-and-white film can cost $50,000 to preserve and restore, while a colour film costs $300,000. The renewal of David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia took a year and cost $1 million.
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