Forgotten shadows; the birth of the cinema
Forgotten shadows; the birth of the cinema
A few years ago the National Library of Peru, in theheart of Lima, created a traffic jam which was repeated every day for more than two weeks. Outside the library the street was crowded with adults and children. As they filedjpast the entrance, the visitors were counted by a photoelectric cell flicking monotonously at a rate which went as high as five thousand a day. The attraction was a travelling exihibition, intended to explain very simply the newest developments in science, to take science out of the bewildering maze of the laboratory and bring it to the public.
That exhibit which dealt with physics and astronomy was seen throughout Latin America and is still travelling. It was followed by three other science exhibitions which have already been seen in 26 countries by about 1,500,000 people. But in the files of Unesco there is something even more important than the itinerary of the travelling exhibitions, more important than the names and number of the countries visited. It is the evidence of the incalculable enrichment these exhibitions and others on education and the arts have brought to the lives of countless persons in small towns as well as large cities on every continent.
One day, for example, a Unesco exhibition on modern art arrived, at a place called Tizi-Ouzou, a small, rarely visited town in the rugged hills of Algeria. It was on a tour organized for overseas areas by the French National Commission for Unesco. From miles around villagers flocked into Tizi-Ouzou to take a look. Some -came, scratched their heads and with a shrug went away. Many others, like the schoolmaster from the distant mountains of Kabylia, looked for à long time and then sat down and wrote Unesco their impressions.
"I was passing through Tizi-Ouzou," the schoolmaster said, "and was privileged to be able to see the Unesco travelling exhibition on modern art... Until now I had no chance to see modern paintings at first hand and your exhibit revealed to me a form of art I knew nothing about and the very existence of which I barely suspected."
There are numerous examples of whole communities joining together to buy a duplicate set of a Unesco exhibition in order to be sure that it would always be on display or in circulation in the country. After one exhibition had been shown at the Perth Art Gallery in Australia, a public subscription was started to which students, teachers, artists and other citizens contributed one hundred pounds for the purchase of a duplicate set. And the curator of the Perth gallery wrote : "The exhibition proved a great stimulus to the art-loving public and created considerable interest among those to whose notice it brought the work of some contemporary artists for the first time."
At present, travelling art exhibits on the Old Masters, Modern Art, Leonardo da Vinci and old Japanese woodcuts are touring the world. Other Unesco exhibitions have included a broad range of subjects such as the emancipation of women, freedom of information, music and the cinema, children's books, education and peace, school architecture, man's fight against the desert and the jungle, the history of human rights, and the protection of nature.
This issue of the Courier has been inspired by three recent Unesco exhibitions. Two Thousand Years of Chinese Art, Man Measures the Universe, and Horizons of the Cinema. Only limited aspects of these, of course, could be dealt with in these pages. "Horizons of the Cinema" was first erected at the International Film Festival at Venice in 1953, and is now a permanent exhibit at the Paris Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques. A smaller version (on the origins of the cinema) is touring or has completed tours of cities and towns in 12 countries. It has been shown at educational conferences in Egypt, Spain and Canada. In Canada it has also served as the basis for an important television programme. It is now sixty years since the motion picture was invented. The following pages are a salute on the part of Unesco to the artists and technicians who have contributed to it as a means of human expression.