Filmanthropy can be one of a number of things - helping those less fortunate to make films, helping in the preservation of the films and screening classic films for others. While this makes me realize that I am a filmanthropist in more ways than one, Variety has a great little report on some bigger named filmanthropists and their ventures.

My favorite filmanthropist on their list? Martin Scorsese:

Sometime in the late 1980s, Martin Scorsese learned that more than 75% of silent films had either deteriorated or disappeared completely. “It was even more disturbing to realize that 50% of all films made in America before 1950, sound and silent, were gone.”

So, in 1990, Scorsese gathered together his friends Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Coppola, Woody Allen, Robert Redford, Stanley Kubrick and Sydney Pollack and started the Film Foundation. ‘We were able to get the archivists into the front offices of the studios and begin a program of systematic restoration of all the major titles in the vaults.’

In addition to film preservation, the foundation offers educational programs that teach students how to interpret the language of film.

‘And because visual language today is so important — much more than ever — it’s essential for them to understand how to express themselves using the grammar of film as opposed to the grammar of advertising, which is something very different, made with a very different purpose,’ Scorsese says.

He draws on the sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

‘Why does it seem so immediate when it was made 57 years ago?” he asks. “You can start by examining the writing, the acting, the lighting, the framing, the use of music. And then the political context of 1950-51, when that film was made: You can learn a great deal about the history of America at that point, and understand how what’s going on outside the movie can inform the action, the story choices, the emphases. And it gives you a way of looking at our own period, the one we’re in right now, seeing the similarities and the differences.’

Read the ENTIRE piece to learn more about other big name filmanthropists and takepart to learn about the film foundation and Martin Scorsese’s work.

Related:

Long-lost scenes from Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ found
Moviemakers practice filmanthropy

*photo by Luciano Menardo