As reported in Dawn.com, Scorsese urged his listeners to preserve our shared cinematic heritage before it disappears, a sentiment which I am in absolute agreement with. As Scorsese noted, “I believe we need to stress visual literacy in schools. Young people need to understand that not all images are out there to be consumed like, you know, fast food and then forgotten. We need to educate them to understand the difference between moving images that engage their humanity and their intelligence, and moving images that are just selling them something.”
As Dawn.com’s anonymous correspondent added, “to fully comprehend the language of moving images, it is essential to ‘preserve everything’ from blockbusters to home movies by way of films that may not look like works of art on first showing, [Scorsese] said. To prove his point, Scorsese screened a clip from Vertigo – hailed today as a work of genius, but at the time of its release in 1958 regarded as just another in a string of crowd-pleasing Alfred Hitchcock psycho thrillers.
‘[Vertigo] came very very close to being lost to us,’ he said, adding that over time, viewers can identify and appreciate elements in a film that might not be evident upon its initial release. ‘Just as we learned to take pride in our poets and writers, and in jazz and blues, we need to take pride in our cinema, a great American art form. It’s a big responsibility, and we need to say to ourselves that the time has come to look beyond weekend box office numbers and start caring for films as if they were the oldest book in the Library of Congress,’ [Scorsese] said.”
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