Rendering on Cinema №2

The article published on the website telegraph.co.uk on April 2, 2013 is headlined “Martin Scorsese: Teach visual literacy”.  The article reports at length that film director Martin Scorsese delivered keynote Jefferson humanities lecture and appealled for children to learn 'visual literacy' and for film heritage to be protected. Film director Martin Scorsese has made an impassioned plea for young people to embrace the rich cinema heritage of America before it disappears.

It’s an open secret that the 70-year-old Oscar-winning director of films such as Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Taxi Driver was delivering the annual Jefferson humanities lecture at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington. 

Analyzing the situation, it is necessary to note that Scorsese had been the first filmmaker to deliver the Jefferson address since it was launched in 1972 (writers Tom Wolfe, Arthur Miller and Robert Penn Warren have been previous guest speakers) and he called for "visual literacy" to be taught in schools, as he cited a reference to Plato's Phaedrus. Moreover, Scorsese's lecture incorporated a wide variety of movie clips to illustrate the four factors he regards as crucial to film — light ("something at the beginning of cinema"), movement, time and inference. 

There is a lot of comment on how Scorsese argued that to fully comprehend the language of moving images, it was essential to "preserve everything" from blockbusters to home movies, by way of films which may not look like works of art on first showing. To prove his point, Scorsese screened a clip from Vertigo — regarded now as a work of brilliance but dismissed by many at the time of its release in 1958 as just another crowd-pleasing Alfred Hitchcock thriller.

In resolute terms, the author of the article gives details that according to Scorsese, people need to take pride in their cinema, a great American art form and to treat every last moving image as reverently and respectfully as the oldest book in the Library of Congress.

The article draws the conclusion that when it comes to preserving films there is a danger in an era when a film's success is defined by its box-office takings, a standard which "culturally trivialises film". 

As for me, I absolutely agree with Scoesese that we should be proud of our poets and writers, should be proud of film manufacturing, because it’s our own unique history.