Martin Scorsese Argues For Film Preservation in 2013 Jefferson Lecture

National Endowment for the Humanities Martin Scorsese delivering the 2013 Jefferson Lecture in Washington.

Drawing upon films that included Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Thomas Edison’s short of two cats engaged in a boxing match, Martin Scorsese made the case on Monday evening that Americans “need to take pride in our cinema, our great American art form” and that all films need to be preserved, regardless of their box-office performance or apparent cultural merit.

Mr. Scorsese, the Academy Award-winning director of films like “Mean Streets,” “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas” and “The Departed,” made these remarks during his delivery of the Jefferson Lecture, the prestigious annual event held by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Following past speakers like Saul Bellow, Walker Percy and Toni Morrison, Mr. Scorsese gave a speech called “Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema,” which was presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington and streamed live on the Internet.

Beginning with a portion of the “The Magic Box,” a 1951 motion picture about the invention of motion pictures, and drawing from works by Georges Méliès, Auguste and Louis Lumière, D. W. Griffith, Stanley Kubrick and other directors, Mr. Scorsese said that an era of “classical cinema” was “really almost gone.”

“It’s been overwhelmed by moving images coming at us all the time and absolutely everywhere,” Mr. Scorsese said, after showing a portion of the star-gate sequence from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” “Even faster than the visions coming at the astronaut in the Kubrick picture.”

Lamenting the end of the celluloid era of movie-making Mr. Scorsese said: “I grew up with celluloid, with its particular beauty and its idiosyncrasies. But cinema has always been tied to technological development, and if we spend too much time lamenting what’s gone, then we’re going to miss the excitement of what’s happening now.”

“But in order to experience something,” he added, “and find new values in it, it’s got to be there in the first place. You have to preserve - you have to preserve it. All of it.”

Mr. Scorsese, a longtime advocate of film preservation and chairman of the World Cinema Foundation, pointed to motion pictures like “Citizen Kane” and “Vertigo” as works now recognized as classics but which were nearly lost in past decades.

Today, Mr. Scorsese said, “Not only do we have to preserve everything, but most importantly, we can’t afford to let ourselves be guided by cultural standards, particularly now.” Those judgments, he said, must be made irrespective of a film’s box-office grosses, which he said have “become kind of a sport and really a form of judgment” that “culturally trivializes film.”

Concluding his lecture, Mr. Scorsese said, “We need to say to ourselves that the moment has come, when we have to treat every last moving image as reverently and respectfully as the oldest book in the Library of Congress.”

Earlier in the evening Mr. Scorsese showed selections from “The Red Shoes,” the 1948 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, which he has been instrumental in helping to restore. Mr. Scorsese also argued for the greatness of the 1951 science-fiction film “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” whose hulking robot character he correctly identified as Gort.