Martin Scorsese and Jack White on the past and future

Martin Scorsese is founder of The Film Foundation, "a nonprofit organization established in 1990...dedicated to protecting and preserving motion picture history by providing annual support for preservation and restoration projects at the leading film archives. Since its inception, the foundation has been instrumental in raising awareness of the urgent need for film preservation and has helped to save over 560 motion pictures. In addition, the foundation also creates innovative educational programs such as The Story of Movies, an interdisciplinary curriculum designed to teach students about the cultural, artistic, and historical significance of film."

~~

In a related note, Jack White commented recently on the tenuous shelf-life of digital media: "A lot of the digital formats in the last 20 years have proven to be anything but fail-safe," he said to The Atlantic. "The tapes break or the information can't be retrieved." White recently donated $200,000 to the National Recording Preservation Foundation, a non-profit that seeks to preserve and make accessible the recorded history of America. White believes "that more modern ways of recording aren't as reliable as older approaches when it comes to keeping the original versions of songs safe. He also spoke about how people dismissed the masters of early phonograph recordings in the States, saying: 'There are stories of early phonograph companies taking apart the masters used to press wax discs so they could be sold as roofing shingles. They didn't think a recording was a document of anything cultural. It was just a way to sell phonographs'."

Against 1s and 0s.

Image of gramaphone record via Wikipedia.