UNESCO Courier articles from July 1995

UNESCO Courier archives from July 1995

An Art and an Industry
July 1, 1995... Torn from the start between money-spinning and creativity, the cinema took a long time to win acceptance as an art in its own right All through its first century, cinema has enjoyed an immense following, but it has also been feared and scorned....

A Birthday or a Funeral?
July 1, 1995... Is the cinema still asking the eternal questions that sustain creative art? Unlike cinema, none of the traditional arts presided over by the nine muses of Antiquity owes its birth to an instrument or an invention. This explains why a doubt has...

Hollywood
July 1, 1995... How the major studios became a dream factory for America and the world Hollywood did not become the motion picture capital of the United States until nearly twenty years after the invention of the new medium. Production was centred in the greater...

Perchance to Dream
July 1, 1995... Economic muscle is not the only explanation for the power of the American cinema Is cinema an art or a commodity? Is it culture or commerce? The big American studios made their choice long ago: cinema is an industry, and every film is a product....

Milos Forman
July 1, 1995... * Tell us about your first contact with the cinema. - It was unforgettable. One Saturday night, when I was four or five years old, my parents took me to see a film in Caslav, the city where I was born in the country that was then called...

Methuselah or Peter Pan?
July 1, 1995... Is the cinema young or old? asks a leading French scriptwriter in a forceful article on the dilemmas facing the seventh art, including the tensions between America and Europe over the liberalization of trade in audiovisual products. It is very...

Jean-Paul Rappeneau
July 1, 1995... French director and screen-writer. His film Cyrano de Bergerac won ten Cesars, the French national film award. * When did you first become a film-goer? - It was just before the Second World War. I enjoyed Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven...

Windows of Opportunity
July 1, 1995... Countries where the film industry is trying to find a niche between television and the powerful international distribution networks Some years ago, when I was in Budapest, Hungary, researching an article about Hungarian cinema, I found that each...

The First Indian Studios
July 1, 1995... Three studios where the world's most prolific film industry was born The Indian film industry was born and took root in and around Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, major port cities where there was a strong backdrop of intellectual and theatre...

Suresh Jindal
July 1, 1995... * When did the Indian cinema begin? - It dates back to the days of the Lumiere brothers who were the first to show films in India. That was in Bombay at the turn of the century. In 1901, Charles Pathe brought his cameras here. The first Indian...

Mani Kaul
July 1, 1995... An Indian director whose film Siddeshwari won an Indian National Award for the best documentary in 1989, Mani Kaul adapted Dostoevski's The Idiot for the screen in 1991. * How did you first come into contact with the cinema? - I came to the...

Abbas Kiarostami
July 1, 1995... * Why do you make films? - Because I can't do anything else! Making films is something I have to do. It's like dreaming: it comes naturally, it fulfils a need. The driver of an Underground train who spends hours travelling through the dark...

A Silver-Screen Symphony
July 1, 1995... Elie Faure (1873-1937) was one of the great art critics of the twentieth century. An ardent humanist who believed in the unity of the universe, of humanity and of art, he had an all-encompassing vision of art, in which he saw parallels between...

Egypt through the Looking-Glass
July 1, 1995... The development of Egyptian cineme has followed the vicissitudes of a nation's life Egyptians have been film fans ever since 1896 when the first Lumiere shorts were shown in Alexandria, only a year after their projection in Paris. By the turn of...

Tomas Gutierrez Alea
July 1, 1995... * Your latest film, Strawberry and Chocolate, tells about an encounter between a homosexual intellectual and a member of the Cuban communist youth movement. Where did you get the idea of looking at the problem of homosexuality in Cuba? - I read...

Mexican Melodrama: The Remake
July 1, 1995... Nostalgia for traditional melodrama is having surprising effects on Mexican cinema today Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's film La Tarea (1990, Homework) is a good starting point for a look at modern Mexican cinema. The viewer's first reaction is...

Nagisa Oshima
July 1, 1995... Japanese director Nagisa Oshima (right) won an international reputation with In the Realm of the Senses (1975). Many of his films, such as Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1982) and Max mon amour (1986), have a compulsive, disturbing quality. * At...

Marcello Mastroianni
July 1, 1995... * What is your first memory of the cinema? - The first film I can remember seeing was Ben Hur.(*) My family and I were living in Turin, where we had emigrated from southern central Italy. It was in about 1930 - I must have been six at the time....

Cinecitta
July 1, 1995... The roller-coaster history of the legendary Italian studios During the night of 26 September 1935, a terrible fire destroyed the Rome studios of Cines, then Italy's biggest film company. It was immediately decided to build a new "cinema city"...

The African Cinema in Crisis
July 1, 1995... Without firm economic and cultural roots in the soil of its own continent, African cinema faces an uphill struggle for survival In the last twenty years the number of festivals, retrospectives, film weeks and special shows devoted to African...

Milco Mancevski
July 1, 1995... * When you were twenty, you decided to leave your country. At the age of thirty-four you returned and shot part of Before the Rain there. Why did you leave? And why did you come back? - I think all twenty-year-olds need to take off and reinvent...

Volker Schlondorff
July 1, 1995... * What was the first film you ever saw? - A kind of German spaghetti western called The Children of Mara Mara. I've never come across it again, but it made a very strong impression on me - it showed some children hung up on meal hooks, like in a...

The Babelsberg Studios
July 1, 1995... Many of the stars of German cinema were born at the legendary Babelsberg Studios outside Berlin. The first studio was built there in 1912 - its walls constructed entirely of glass - on a 40,000-square-metre site acquired the year before by the...

Yesterday's Images for Tomorrow's Eyes
July 1, 1995... The advent of the talkies in the 1930s coincided with the founding of the first film archives. The Swedish Film Institute was created in 1933; the Reichsfilmarchiv in Berlin was founded in 1935 (it ceased to exist after the Second World War), as...

Saving the Cinematic Heritage
July 1, 1995... Embracing as it does painting, theatre, music, literature and photography, the art of the cinema, which was invented in 1895, is the custodian of the memory of the twentieth century and one of the leading forms of expression of a changing world....

Abai Kunanbayev (1845-1904)
July 1, 1995... The work of the Kirghiz writer Chingiz Aitmatov (b. 1928, the grandson of a nomadic shepherd) powerfully illustrates the conflict between modern society and ancient civilizations in the former Soviet Union, as well as confronting the problem of...