Foreign films rate well at American motion picture theatres, but can the science films made by one nation for educational purposes by meaningful -- even with translations -- to the students of another nation?

A University of Southern California expert on educational film will participate in a two-day discussion of the question in Tokyo the weekend of March 16 (1968) and in an evaluation of the prospects for a new kind of cultural exchange between the U.S. and Japan.

USC's Glenn McMurry of Culver City is one of the only four Americans invited to the two-nation conference arranged by the American Science Film Association and Japanese film authorities. Support for the project been provided by the National Science Foundation.

McMurry, director of USC's National Information Center for Educational Media (NICEM), explained that the forthcoming meeting recognized the sometimes-specialized educational filmmaking talent of various nations in the field of science.

"Exchange of such films between nations have been rare, largely because of language barriers," McMurry reports. "The Tokyo session will discuss what we believe is a strong possibility that, with the language barrier overcome by titles or dubbing, the scholars of one nation can take advantage of the many fine science films made from another for educational purposes. While the US has been a leader in educational film making and in the use of all modern educational technology, it cannot be denied that the other nations have also put forth outstanding effort in this field."

Out of this Tokyo conference, it is expected, will come an arrangement to exchange 50 American educational science films for 50 Japanese science films. All will have temporary sound tracks.

The films will then be distributed in the two countries for showing and evaluation at the elementary, secondary, and higher educational levels.

Subject to the films' use in American classrooms and review by American educators, the exchange could become a permanent arrangement and could lead the way to such exchanges with other nations, according to McMurry.

NICEM, which operates the world's only automated index of audiovisual materials, was the subject of a paper which McMurry recently delivered in Paris at an international meeting of experts on the application of electronic methods to the cataloguing of films and television programs.

Arranged by UNESCO, the Paris session concentrated on plans for worldwide standardization of computer techniques in the cataloguing of films.

Also attending the Paris meeting from USC was Arthur Knight of Hollywood, adjutant professor of cinema and film reviewer for the "Saturday Review."

A leader in providing computer-cataloguing techniques, NICEM is now supplying the nation's filmmakers with forms, which NICEM devised for reporting all films to the US Library of Congress.

A copy of each of these input reports also goes to NICEM and is fed into its master data bank on educational films. The bank presently stores information on more than 60,000 films, film strips, and other media, some of them dating back 35 years.

Created just a year ago in cooperation with the McGraw-Hill Book Co. of New York, NICEM is a part of the USC Department of Instructional Technology, School of Education.