Expo 58

• 1. Introduction

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  Expo 58, the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, opened its gates on the 17th of April 1958 on the Heysel Plateau, seven kilometres north-west of central Brussels. Nearly fifteen thousand workers had spent three years preparing a two-square-kilometre site for what would become the first major world's fair registered under the Bureau International des Expositions after the Second World War. By the time the fair closed on the 19th of October, some forty-one and a half million people had passed through. That figure made Expo 58 the second largest world's fair on record, surpassed only by the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, which drew forty-eight million.

  The fair's theme was "Bilan du monde, pour un monde plus humain" - "Evaluation of the world for a more humane world." That motto carried the weight of a particular historical moment: Europe was barely a decade out from the war, and the ethics of atomic power were being debated in parliaments, newspapers, and university lecture halls across the continent. Among the questions Expo 58 would put before its visitors: what kind of future could science build, and at what cost to human dignity? The answers that emerged were not always comfortable.

• 2. The Atomium

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  King Baudouin opened the Atomium with a call for world peace and social and economic progress. The structure itself was a giant model of a unit cell of an iron crystal, with each sphere representing a single atom. Its designers originally intended it to stand for only the six months of the exhibition, then to be dismantled. It was never taken down. On the fiftieth anniversary of the fair, its outer coating was renewed, and it now stands as a permanent emblem of Brussels.

  The Philips Pavilion offered a different kind of spectacle. There, Poème électronique was played back from 425 loudspeakers, each placed at a specific point in the space as designed by Iannis Xenakis and Le Corbusier. It was a commissioned work, created specifically for that location. Visitors who stepped inside heard music and sound unlike anything a concert hall could produce.

• 3. The Human Zoo

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  The Belgian Congo section occupied 7.7 hectares close to the Atomium, divided into seven pavilions covering agriculture, Catholic missions, banking and trade, mines and metallurgy, energy and transport, and a space labelled the village indigène. The last of these is counted among the most notorious "human zoos" of the twentieth century.

  The Ministry of Colonies selected 598 Congolese people to be exhibited. They were educated urbanites, referred to in Belgian parlance as évolués, meaning "evolved." The Ministry nevertheless required them to dress in clothing it characterised as primitive, and posted armed guards to prevent them from communicating with white Belgian visitors. Among those exhibited were 273 men, 128 women, and 197 children, making up 183 families in total. Eight-month-old baby Juste Bonaventure Langa died during the exhibit and is buried in Tervuren Cemetery.

  Native Congolese art was refused for display. The Ministry ruled it insufficiently Congolese, so nearly all the art on show had been made by Europeans working in a deliberately imitative, primitive style. The entrance to the exhibit featured a bust of King Leopold II. In mid-July, the Congolese exhibited protested the condescending treatment they were receiving from spectators and demanded to be sent home, abruptly ending the section. Belgian socialist newspaper Le Peuple had praised the portrayal, calling it "in complete agreement with historical truth." A number of European newspapers later expressed sympathy for the protesters.

• 4. National Pavilions

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  The Czechoslovak pavilion drew six million visitors and was officially awarded the best pavilion of the entire fair. The exposition "One Day in Czechoslovakia" was designed by Jindřich Santar, who worked with artists including Jiří Trnka and Stanislav Libenský. The architects František Cubr, Josef Hrubý and Zdeněk Pokorný designed a simple, modern structure. What made the pavilion remarkable was the degree of creative freedom its makers had secured. František Kahuda, the government committee chairman for exhibitions, protected that freedom within the hard-line communist regime of the 1950s, backing both the Laterna Magika show and Josef Svoboda's technically novel Polyekran.

  The Soviet pavilion took a different approach. It displayed experimental prototypes of Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2, the satellites placed into orbit during the International Geophysical Year. Sputnik 1 had launched on the 4th of October 1957 and completed its geocentric orbit before re-entering the atmosphere on the 4th of January 1958. The pavilion also exhibited a model of the Lenin, the world's first nuclear-powered icebreaker, alongside several Soviet automobiles including the GAZ-21 Volga and the GAZ-13 Chaika. The Soviet exposition was awarded a Grand Prix.

  The Hungarian pavilion's entrance hall displayed the statue group Dancers by József Somogyi and Kerényi Jenő. The sculpture won a Grand Prix and was later purchased by the city of Namur. Hungary's participation unfolded against turbulent circumstances: the decision to attend had been made in 1955 under Stalinist party leader Mátyás Rákosi, shortly after he removed his reformist prime minister Imre Nagy. By the time the exhibition closed, Rákosi had been exiled and Nagy had been tried and executed.

  The Yugoslav pavilion carried its own political meaning. Architect Vjenceslav Richter originally designed a structure suspended from a giant cable-stayed mast. When that proved too complex, he built a tension column of six steel arches supported by a pre-stressed cable, which stood in front of the pavilion as a visual marker representing Yugoslavia's six constituent republics. After the fair, the pavilion was sold, dismantled, and reconstructed as a school in the Belgian municipality of Wevelgem, where it still stands.

  The United States pavilion hosted performances by the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra under Edward Lee Alley, a colour television studio, and a 360-degree film called America the Beautiful, produced by Walt Disney Productions and screened in the Circarama format. After the fair, the film travelled to the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, and then reached its first American audiences at Disneyland in Anaheim in 1960.

• 5. Mozart's Requiem Theft

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  Mozart's autograph manuscript of the Requiem was placed on display at Expo 58. At some point during the fair, someone gained access to the manuscript and tore off the bottom right-hand corner of the second-to-last page, folio 99r/45r. The fragment contained the words "Quam olim d: C:". The perpetrator has never been identified, and the torn piece has never been recovered.

• 6. The First Film Poll

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  Expo 58 gave film history one of its defining moments: the first universal film poll ever held. Critics and filmmakers from around the world participated, and the poll drew nominations from 117 critics representing 26 nations. Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925, received 100 votes. Charles Chaplin's The Gold Rush came second with 95. Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, and Erich von Stroheim's Greed rounded out the top six.

  A jury of young filmmakers was assembled to select a single winner from the nominees. The jury included Robert Aldrich, Satyajit Ray, Alexandre Astruc, Michael Cacoyannis, Juan Bardem, Francesco Maselli and Alexander Mackendrick. They voted not to name a winner. Instead they indicated six films they believed still held particular value for working filmmakers: Battleship Potemkin, Grand Illusion, Mother, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Gold Rush, and Bicycle Thieves. The refusal to rank those six against one another said something the vote totals could not.