The Birth of Writing

Robert Bober, Pierre Dumayet

To be able to read and write seems so natural to us that we cannot easily put ourselves in the shoes of a person who can do neither. This is the obligatory starting point if we are to trace, as Pierre Dumayet and Robert Bober suggest, the infancy of writing. Between the Lascaux drawings and the first traces of writing in 5500 b.c., 10,000 years that elapsed. Over the centuries, man has developed many systems to remember and communicate, first using signs and symbols, then letters. This film follows the progressive affirmations of man’s need to write and explores the reciprocal influence of writing and thinking.