Desmet Collection now World Heritage
Today, Unesco has recognized the Desmet Collection of EYE (formerly Netherlands Filmmuseum) as cultural heritage for the Unesco Memory of the World Register. For the recognition on the Unesco site, look here. For the first time in history and film history, Unesco recognizes a film collection as collection to be world heritage. This is really a milestone within our field.
Together with the archives of the West-Indian Company (Netherlands, Brazil, Ghana, Guyana, Dutch Antilles, Surinam, UK and US), the archives of the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (Netherlands, Curaçao and Surinam), and the epos La Galigo from Sulawesi in the Buginese language (Netherlands, Indonesia), the Desmet Collection has been recognized as one of the 44 recognized nominations for the 2011 edition of application for Unesco’s World Register.
Memory of the World is an Unesco programme that helps countries in saving and publicizing documentary heritage. The Register is the window screen of this programme. This heritage list brings together documents (clay tablets, books, audiovisual materials, digital objects…) of worldwide importance. It shows the beauty and importance of documentary heritage and thus pleas for careful treatment of these materials. The Netherlands recently founded a National Comittee of Memory of the World, chaired by Leo Voogt.
Ivo Blom 
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[…] The Jean Desmet collection is an immensely important collection, recognized as UNESCO World Heritage in 2011, which contains approximately 950 films from cinema’s early years from between 1907-1916, 2000 posters, 700 posters as well as some 120.000 business documents. It is a collection which especially in the 1980s and 1990s through screenings at the silent film festival Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone in Italy made film scholars aware of the great variety and richness of for example film colours in the silent era, and has been crucial in understanding the cinema distribution networks in the Netherlands as well as in Northern Europe. The Dutch film historian Ivo Blom who is one of the most knowledgeable scholars on the collection has written in more detail on this in blog posts and in book form (which can be downloaded for free!) here and here. […]
Grazie. Questa settimana ho visto le prove del mio articolo sui manifesti Desmet nel libro sul prossimo catalogo della mostra Desmet (apre dicembre da EYE): bellissimo.