Fimmaker Martin Scorsese introducing the world restoration premiere of "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" at the 2008 New York Film Festival. (Photo courtesy of David Godlis)

D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), and Gone with the Wind (1939), are classic films by almost anyone’s standards. But keeping these pictures alive after so many years is no easy task, and one of the organizations doing this is a non-profit group called The Film Foundation.

Started in 1993 by Martin Scorsese and fellow filmmakers that include Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Altman, The Film Foundation is the leading organization devoted to saving the 20th century’s cinematic gems from the damage wrought by time and neglect.

One of its more recently completed projects was a major restoration of Sergio Leone’s 1968 classic Once Upon a Time in the West, which conservators restored using the original Technoscope negative held in Italy for decades. The result was a printing element of such quality that one might think Leone shot it last week.

“There are two ways to restore a film,” explains the foundation’s executive director Margaret Bodde. “One is to utilize age-old techniques in a lab working film to film, and the other is digital restoration.”

The more traditional lab techniques to which Bodde refers require the use of photo chemicals. Digital restoration, on the other hand, entails creating a high-resolution scan of a print that is as close as possible to the original, restoring it using computer software, and then transferring it back to film. While expensive and time consuming, this process enables conservators to do things that weren’t possible 20 years ago, making it beneficial in those instances where a film is in particularly bad shape.

“Currently, we’re involved in the restoration of Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes [1948], which used the three-strip Technolcolor film where you have the red, green, and blue color records,” says Bodde. “These negatives were badly deteriorated and had mold all over them, which made digital restoration a necessity.”

Had photochemical restoration been the only option in this case, the mold damage, even once remedied, would have caused a misregistration of the original colors, producing a green, red, or blue line along the edge of the print during projection. The digital process, according to Bodde, offers a level of precision that avoids this problem, restoring the 61-year-old print to its original condition.

Of course, deterioration is not exclusive to those prints locked away for a half century or longer. It was the fading of color film stocks after just a decade that raised Martin Scorsese’s concern more than 30 years ago and was, in part, responsible for the young filmmaker’s decision to shoot Raging Bull in black and white. Driven by this concern, Scorsese created a groundswell among filmmakers and pushed Kodak to produce a low-fade color film stock that has been in use since the 1980s.

“When Marty went around the world promoting Raging Bull, he would do a press conference for the film, and then he’d do one about the importance of film preservation,” says Bodde. “As a filmmaker and film scholar, he is completely committed to preserving films from the past.”

The Film Foundation is a manifestation of this commitment, and through corporate sponsors and partnerships with a national lineup of film archives, the organization has overseen and funded the restoration of hundreds of motion pictures of big studio and independent creation. But its mission to preserve the legacy of film goes beyond the restoration process itself.

The Film Foundation’s education programs work with middle and high school students around the country, teaching them the language of film and how the visual medium tells stories. According to Bodde, the goal here is introducing the next generation of moviegoers to film history and visual literacy, making the viewing of films from the past a productive exercise in creative thinking.

Bodde hopes that such awareness will spread throughout all age groups, which is something to keep in mind next time you’re putting together your cue on Netflix. A great movie may come out next week, but there were great ones made 50 years ago. Thanks to groups like The Film Foundation, they’ll be around for another 50.

Be sure to read about the preservation of the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (collectively known as The Charters of Freedom) in the June print and online editions of The Erickson Tribune.