Martin Scorsese is more than just a world-class filmmaker.
The Oscar winner has used his clout to promote films across the culture, understanding how his voice can move the medium forward. He also helped create The Film Foundation in 1990, a group dedicated to “protecting and preserving motion picture history,” according to its mission statement.
It’s one of several groups devoted to that cause, one that secures the legacy of not just specific films but maintains a valuable part of western culture.
Organizations like The Film Foundation would be the most obvious source of outrage for a recent case of film censorship. Multiple versions of 1971’s “The French Connection,” which won the Best Picture Oscar, have trimmed a sequence for airing racially insensitive slurs.
The scene doesn’t celebrate that ignorance. It’s the filmmaker’s way of describing why the film’s anti-hero, Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle, is such a complicated soul.
So far, few people have spoken out against the overt censorship. The mainstream Hollywood press has aggressively ignored the issue. Celebrities, so often vocal on social media, have stood down on the matter.
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Tom Six, the director of “The Human Centipede,” is a rare exception.
One could argue the groups in question haven’t heard about the censorship given the lack of media coverage. Hollywood in Toto reached out to five film organizations to get their reaction to the censorship.
- The Film Foundation
- American Film Institute (AFI)
- National Film Registry
- National Film Preservation Foundation
- The Sundance Film Festival
Are they concerned about the matter? Is it setting a dangerous precedent?
We’ve already seen “Sensitivity Readers” censor classic works of art by Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie.
Are beloved films next?
Four of the five groups ignored this site’s press request. AFI responded swiftly but said it couldn’t rally someone to respond to the queries in time for the story’s publication. The organizations were given nearly two days to respond. Each could have done so via email with a prepared statement.
Instead, they chose silence.
Leonardo DiCaprio, a frequent Scorsese collaborator, narrated a letter the director wrote in 1980 to his “friends and fellow film lovers” about the precarious state of film preservation.
“Everything we’re doing right now means absolutely nothing. All of our agonizing labor and creative effort is for nothing because our films are vanishing,” Scorsese wrote at the time.
Flash forward to 2023. Scorsese, like the vast majority of his peers, can’t spare a syllable as a classic film gets censored to appease modern sensibilities.
The post Film Preservation Groups Silent on ‘French Connection’ Censorship first appeared on Hollywood in Toto.
The post Film Preservation Groups Silent on ‘French Connection’ Censorship appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.
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