All media, like the automobile and telephone, are essentially a third party which relates us to whatever else it is we're doing. I think the student riots are a manifestation of a deep-seated awareness of this problem. There's such a contagiousness now with rioting; I think we realize that rarely do we directly deal with issues, personally, physically, intimately, with real body contact. That could easily be the cause, or at least partial cause, of the riots. We suddenly realize that riots may be the only real form of theatre left in which we're not just an audience.
But, you see, being an audience is necessary. A major factor in living in an overpopulated world is that we really cannot deal with each other directly. As the Japanese do, for example. They've spent thousands of years cultivating this idea that they're there but they're not there. Because they've been jammed together for a long time, they've learned how to do it. Now our culture is moving in that direction also. That's one reason for all these transfer systems— photo-reality, mock-reality, artificial intelligence, whatever term you choose— are spontaneously and unconsciously evolving. It's a tremendous urgent unconscious need to realize that we can't really see each other face to face. We only see each other through the subconsciousness of some other system. Cybernetics and the looping-around of the man/machine synergy are what we've been after all along. Who knows, but certainly for the last thousand years man has been inching toward that point, and now we're running full speed. And, of course, the machines we're running toward can trip us up as easily as not. We really can't be certain. But movies are the ultimate illusionistic system. I'm working more and more with tools that show it can go far beyond its present form. Holograms obviously are a key direction to go into: where things are stored on a molecular level.
World Expositions and Nonordinary Reality
In this forthcoming global activity of continual myth-generation, dramatic-fiction cinema will find a new and vital role to play. Although obsolete in one respect it will become enriched in another. While videotape cartridges and cable television will bring conventional cinema into the home on an individual level, society will seek its communal mythic experiences in elaborate intermedia environments found today only at world expositions where the average citizen is able to experience, for a limited time, the wealth and inventiveness that is kept from him in everyday existence.
"There's a basic human need for a communal experience of vision," observes Roman Kroitor, who developed the spectacular Labyrinthe for Expo '67 at Montreal. Kroitor's Canadian firm, Multi-screen Limited, has perfected a revolutionary projection system to be included in a chain of local theatres with screens seven stories high. The process, originally called Multivision, was developed for Expo '70 in Osaka. It involves 70mm. film projected horizontally rather than vertically. Through what is known as the "rolling loop" or loop-wave" method of film transport, the Multivision projector throws an image as high as the ordinary 70mm. frame is wide (each frame of Kroitor's film is the size of a postal card and has fifteen sprocket-hole perforations). The rolling-loop system removes virtually all tension from the film during transport through the projector at 336 feet per minute, stopping and starting every twenty-fourth of a second. Thus it is possible to project a seven-story image of perfect steadiness and crystal clarity.
As the name Multivision implies, the movie contains from three to several dozen independently-moving images on the screen simultaneously, thus approaching on an environmental scale what had existed in 16mm. synaesthetic cinema for decades. Here, however, the synaesthetic experience is three times the size of Cinerama and encompasses a ninety-degree span of vision from any location in the theatre. "New kinds of storytelling and new audience tastes will result from this technology," Kroitor said. "People are tired of the standard plot structure. New film experiences will result, in which there'll be a tight relationship between the movie and the architecture in which it's housed. We took a step in that direction with Labyrinthe. A new language is going to develop. There are ways in which shaping the relationships of images cuts through the superficial realities and reaches for something deeper."
Chamber One of Roman Kroitor's Labyrinthe at Expo '67, Montreal, Canada. From eight balconies on four levels on either side of the space, the audience could see a huge screen on the floor and another perpendicular to it. Both screens were approximately forty feet long. Some 288 speakers surrounded the audience.
Photo: courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
Chamber Three of Labyrinthe, in a five-screen cruciform arrangement. Photo: courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
Francis Thompson, a pioneer in large-scale multi-image film techniques, currently is working toward both micro- and macro-environmental experiences. "We're interested in films expanding and swallowing a huge audience," he said, "but we're also interested in pictures the size of a wristwatch. We would like to make the world's smallest motion picture as well as the largest. As regards the idea of expanded cinema, I would like to make a theatre that would be a huge sphere, as big as Radio City Music Hall or larger, and seat the audience around one side of it: a series of balconies so everybody's in the front row. The audience would become part of the sphere. The picture comes around as far as you can see, and beneath you too.
Two scenes from Francis Thompson's We Are Young for the Canadian Pacific-Cominco Pavilion at Expo '67. The six-screen arrangement covered a total area of 2,952 square feet. By comparison, normal commercial theatre screens average 450 square feet.
The Diapolyceran Screen at the Czechoslovakian Pavilion at Expo '67. The 32 by 20 foot screen was composed of 112 rear-projection cubes containing two slide projectors each. In turn, each slide projector was equipped with a tray of eighty slides that could be changed in half a second. Thus each cube was capable of displaying 160 images in eighty seconds. The entire wall could be one picture, or sections of it could be delayed or speeded as desired. Photo: courtesy of Bergen Motion Picture Service.
The Diapolyceran Screen, Expo '67. Photo: courtesy of Bergen Motion Picture Service.
"What I would like to see is a theatre with so great an area that you no longer think in terms of a screen: it's the area you're projecting on. Your images should come out of this great, completely-surrounding area and hit you in the eye or go off into infinity. So you're no longer working with a flat surface but rather an infinite volume.
Thompson's other major interest is the earphone/eyephone concept similar to the hoodlike training devices used in aircraft and aerospace navigation schools. A mini-dome or individual sphere is lowered over the head of the viewer. "You have images that completely fill your field of vision and sound that would fill your entire range of hearing." Thompson also finds in expanded cinema the potential for a new consciousness and life style. "Through formal relationships of images, most carefully planned, you can produce the most powerful kind of communication. With a great sphere you're introducing people into a whole new visual world which would be emotionally, physically, and intellectually overwhelming."