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Documenting Catholic Media Activities all Over the World: The Signis, Ocic and Unda Archives

2009; Routledge; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439680902722600

1465-3451

Guido Convents, Tom Van Beeck,

Religious Tourism and Spaces

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1 A part of the Unda archives stayed in Fribourg (or they are lost), where its general secretary was established until the 1970s. Then the Unda general secretary was transferred to Belgium, and was settled almost in the same building as OCIC (rue de l’Orme). A part of OCIC archives of the 1930s were lost because of the war when the Germans occupied its building. The General Secretary of OCIC remained almost 50 years in the same building (rue de l’Orme)—a former house of Yvonne de Hemptinne (1908–1994). She started working at OCIC in 1934 and she stayed until the early 1990s. Around 1996, OCIC and Unda moved into the same building in the Rue du Saphir 15, 1030 Brussels, at that occasion their archives were for the first time centralised. At the present moment, a small part of the recent documents of Unda and OCIC from end of the 1990s, a photograph and an audiovisual collection are still preserved in the archives of SIGNIS (rue royale 310 Brussels). 2 Before November 2001, when SIGNIS was founded, there existed three ‘official’ international media organisations recognised by the Vatican: OCIC, Unda (means Wave in Latin) and UCIP (the International Catholic Union of the Press); see Enrico Baragli, Comunicazione e pastorale. Sociologia pastorale degli strumenti della comunicazione sociale, 218-218-240 (Le organizzazioni Internazionali Cattoliche) (Rome, 1974). UCIP is established in Switzerland. The former German UCIP president Gunter Mees published a history of the organisation Stimme der Stimmlosen. UCIP—Katholische Weltunion der Presse: Anmerkungen, Episoden, Hintergründe (Münster, 2005). The web site of UCIP (www.ucip.ch) has English, German, Spanish and French sections. The web site of SIGNIS (www.signis.net) is trilingual: French, Spanish and English. 3 Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning (eds) Une invention du Diable? Cinéma des premiers temps et religion (An invention of the Devil. Religion and Early Cinema) (Laval/Lausanne, 1992). Guido Convents, Cattolici e Cinema (1896–2001), in: Gian Piero Brunetta (ed.) Storia del cinema mondiale. Americhe, Africa, Asia, Oceania. Le cinematografi nazionali, Volume 5 (Torino, 2001), 485–517. Robert Molhant, Catholics in the Cinema. A Strange History of Belief and Passion. Beginnings: 1895–1935 (Brussels, 2000). 4 OCIC was in the 1950s until the 1980s very involved in the International Centre of Films for Children and Young People (ICFCYP/CIFEJ through the Belgian Dominican Fr Leo Lunders 1905–1986), who was an international pioneer of children's cinema and of censorship. [Leo Lunders, La censure des films et l’admission des enfants au cinéma à travers le monde (Brussels, 1959) or Leo Lunders, Los problemas del cine y la juventud (Madrid, 1957).] He was Secretary-General of the Catholic Film League in Belgium in the 1930s and later on OCIC's representative at UNESCO. In 1947, he participated at the first film jury organised by OCIC at the international film Festival of Brussels. In charge of OCIC's service of films for children, he chaired the first study days devoted to films for children within the framework of the 1950 Mostra at Venice. In 1959, he was as consultant for Fred Zinneman's film The Nun's Story with Audrey Hepburn. At the same period, he launched a wide survey on the legislation governing the admission of children to the cinema in different countries. See article: G.C., Enfance et Cinéma. 50th anniversaire du Centre International du film pour l’Enfance et la Jeunesse (CIFEJ), SIGNIS Media, (4), 26–27 (Brussels, 2005). In 2003, an important part of his archives and his library was donated by Guido Convents to the KADOC. He participated until the mid-1980s in a large number of children film festivals in Eastern Europe. 5 See the history of OCIC written by the Canadian Léo Bonneville (1920–2007), published as Soixante-dix ans au service du Cinéma et de l’audiovisuel (Quebec, OCIC, 1998). 6 In 1963, the German Government granted the assistance upon the request of the Archbishop of Manila to build a powerful radio. After six years, in 1969, Radio Veritas Asia was inaugurated and test broadcasts for various languages were conducted. Today, with Radio Vatican, it is one of the most powerful Catholic radio stations in Asia. 7 Nadeem John Shakir, Pakistan 50 years of Catholic Broadcasting Association Lahore, SIGNIS Media, 3 (Brussels, 2006), 24. 8 Bolivia. 50 años de Radio Pío XII o el Indio-Radio, SIGNIS Media, (2), 24–25 (Brussels, 2007). Costa Rica. Treinta años de radio cultural por los campesinos, SIGNIS Media, (2) (Brussels, 2007), 24. 9 In 1979, the Jesuit Kevin Francis Kersen submitted his thesis for a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: The structures, activities and policies of Unda, the International Catholic Association for radio and television (6 Volumes), in which he gives a description of the members and the organisation of Unda in the 1970s. 10 See the Unda publication Educommunication Nouvelles, which started in may 1987 as a trimestrial bulletin, which covers the (Catholic) activities in this field worldwide and is not restricted to the Western hemisphere. It goes also from Argentina, the Philippines to the Fiji islands. 11 In the 1990s, OCIC started with world markets for Catholic videos and TV programmes, and a number of this material and documentation makes part of this collection. They were held all over Europe: Lisbon, Cologne, Driebergen, Vilnius and Rome. 12 At some points it misjudged the situation, as in the 1930s OCIC thought in buying the special invention the Eidophon of the German priest Heinrich Könemann that they could have a decisive grip on the film worldwide. It turned out to be a disaster for the organisation. See Robert Molhant, 22–27. 13 These activities were also important for the fostering of the ecumenical dialogue with the protestant film and media organisations WACC and Interfilm in organising together conferences on cinema and spirituality, and also giving ecumenical film awards at international film festivals as Nyon, Berlin, Cannes, Montréal, Oberhausen, Karlovy vary, Leipzig, Cottbus, Zlinn or Mannheim. Since 2000, this was also done with other religions (Hindus, Muslims); international juries are composed and in this way there are interreligious juries in Yerevan, Tehran, Brisbane and Nyon in 2007. 14 The OCIC/Unda archives documents also the Papal encyclicals concerning media like Vigilante Cura (1936), Miranda Prorsus (1957) or Inter Mirifica (1963), and different pastoral letters and instructions or documents on social communications published by the Pontifical Council of Social Communications, like Communio e Progresso (1971), Aetatis Novae (1992) or Ethics in Communication (2000). 15 The history of these OCIC magazines (and their different language editions)—La Revue Internationale du Cinema, OCIC information, OCIC Info, Cine & Media—is well documented until 1998 by L. Bonneville, 57–63 and 223–225. Unda had its own publications and newsletters, also in French and English. 16 The Flemish section (KFL) of the Belgian member of OCIC gave a large part of its archives to KADOC. It still has an enormous documentation of more than 80,000 files on films since the 1930s in its actual offices. In the OCIC archives, there are also thousands of critical notes on films published by the French- and Flemish-speaking members of OCIC from the 1930s until the 1990s. The archives have also the critical notes on films of the OCIC members of Canada, Portugal, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Italy, and so on. They are often published in the form of a magazine. The documentation on thousands of films, part of the archives of the French member of OCIC (Les fiches du Cinéma), were bought at the end of the 1990s by the Bibliothèque du Film (BIFI) in Paris. 17 Walfredo Piñera and María Caridad Cumaná, Mirada al cine cubano (Brussels, 1999), 109–118. 18 The Catholic centre of cinema in Cairo organises every year one of the most attended national film festivals in Egypt. In doing so it is the oldest film festival in Africa: Ida Ghali, Egypte. Festival de la centrale Catholique de cinema, SIGNIS Media, (2), 27 (Brussels, 2007). Here Ghali reviews the 55th edition of the festival. The Catholics (a minority) in Sri Lanka have organised the national film festival in the country for years. 19 At the end of the 1950s, Unda started with a television festival in Monte Carlo, which became in the early 1960s the famous international TV festival of Monte Carlo. The Unda jury discussed TV productions. Fr Patrick Keppel wrote a Ph.D. on the origins of the TV festival of Monte-Carlo and Unda (Aux Origines du Festival de Television de Monte-Carlo L’association Unda. Les premières Rencontres catholiques internationales, situées dans l’histoire théologique et pastorale des medias (3 Volumes) (Université de Nice, 1991/1992). 20 Angela Ann Zukowski and Pierre Bélanger (ed.) Radio Presence. A Collection of International Stories & Experiences (Brussels, 2000). See articles such as: Radio versus dictators, Unda Newsletter, x (5) (Brussels, June 1966), 1, about the role of Radio Soleil in Haiti against Jean Claude Duvalier. The same can be found in the Philippines (against Marcos) and in Peru (against Fujimori). 21 To avoid the idea that OCIC was an office of the Vatican, in 1970 it had to change its denomination as International Catholic Office for Cinema into International Catholic Organisation for Cinema. 22 These congresses were held since 1929 in cities like in Munich, Brussels, Rome, Quito, Bangkok, Manila, Nairobi and Prague, with hundreds of participants—representatives of Catholic organisations working in audiovisual areas—coming from all continents. Some of these congresses had prominent media specialists as guests like Sean MacBride in Nairobi (see The Changing World. Sean MacBride Speaks out, Unda Newsletter (Nairobi special), x(9–10) (Brussels, 1983), 18–19. 23 In 1967, Unda held a conference for Asia on radio and television in Cotabato City. Reports from Ceylon, Hong Kong, India, Japan, New Guinea, Thailand, Micronesia (Caroline islands), Vietnam and the Philippines were presented. They form a rich documentation on these media in this region, and they also give a context of the letters found in the Unda archives. 24 Since the 1970s, OCIC published a series of books with the UCL professor Victor Bachy on African cinema; some were written by African authors. OCIC became at that time one of the first international organisations to promote African (but also non-western) cinema. In Latin America, OCIC and Unda with WACC published books such as José Martínez Terrero, Comunicación grupal liberadora (Florida; Buenos Aires, 1986) or Cees Hamelink, Hacia una autonomía cultural en las comunicaciones mundiales (Florida; Buenos Aires, 1985). 25 Already by the 1920s and 1930s, it became clear that not one overall Catholic review could be made by one organisation for the Catholics worldwide. So every national Catholic organisation had to review the films in its country. Every country had its own culture(s) and its own moral standards. This means that something that was considered as a film for children in Belgium or France could be deemed suitable for adults in the USA. Films that received a very positive critique in Germany by the local Catholic film commission could receive a negative one in Italy. The international Catholic (or ecumenical) juries in international film festivals has to be seen in this light, as a way to find values in films that can be shared by different national Catholic or Christian communities. Since 1947, more than 1000 films received an award or were commended at international film festivals by Catholics in international juries. Vittorio Bicego, Giorgio Bruni, Alfredo Casarosa and Cosimo Scaglioso (eds) Un cinema per l’Uomo. Venit anni di attività dell’organizzazione cattolica internazionle del cinema (OCIC) (Firenze, 1976). 26 OCIC missionary service visited regularly the NAB shows in Los Angles: http://www.nab.org