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Scorsese And RomeFilmFest Team For Preservation Initiative By Rich Drees
The announcement was made this past Sunday during an appearance by the director at the first annual RomeFilmFest. This program will mark the first time that a film festival will directly finance film restoration. No details on how much money has been earmarked for the project have been disclosed.
Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West was chosen due to the scarcity of prints of the film and the general poor condition of those prints still in circulation.
Scorsese has long been a public proponent of film restoration. He, along with several other film directors including Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Frances Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack and George Lucas, formed the Film Foundation in 1990 to encourage studios to take an active part in preserving their films.
“At the time, film archives restored films,” Scorsese stated in a press release on the RomeFilmFest website.
“It arose from anger and frustration we felt, myself and other directors, over the impossibility of seeing films like Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) and Once Upon A Time In America. So I started wanting to find and preserve them. When we founded the Film Foundation, in 1990, they suggested I go to the Hollywood studios. Fortunately, in that period after Goodfellas, which everyone liked, they listened to me.”
“You can find
that color (deterioration) can happen as quickly as within six
years,” said Scorsese on the fragility of traditional celluloid film
as a medium. “Millions of dollars goes into this industry and nobody
thought about preserving the film. It's incredible." Previously, the Film Foundation has participated in the restoration of such films as It Happened One Night (1932), How Green Is My Valley (1941), Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt (1943), On The Waterfront (1954), Night Of The Hunter (1955), Kubrick’s Paths Of Glory (1957) and Eraserhead (1977) as well as a collection of early, silent-era Italian films, the complete films of director Satyajit Ray and early 8mm films by experimental filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar. |
October 17, 2006- Film director Martin Scorsese announced
that the non-profit film preservation organization The Film
Foundation which he helped found will be joining forces with the
RomeFilmFest in a new initiative to restore and preserve
approximately 100 classic Italian films, starting with director
Sergio Leone’s 1968 classic spaghetti western Once Upon A Time In
The West.