Expanding Cinema: Expo 67 Reconstructions and Other Finds
Program by Janine Marchessault
The CinemaExpo67.ca Research Group has been working over many years, in partnership to excavate and digitally reconstruct the multi-screen films that played at Montreal’s Expo 67. Some of the films we have found and reassembled are presented over the three programs on Friday and Saturday. Imax was imagined by filmmakers like Graeme Ferguson and Roman Kroitor, the inventors of Imax, whose films we are screening along with some of Ontario Place’s Imax Collection produced throughout the 1970s. This program celebrates Canada’s cinematic heritage.
In program III, New Works and experiments by contemporary media artists inspired by the original event will be screened. Animation, found and decayed footage, and multi-screen performance brings the event into the 21st century.
Montreal’s Expo 67 represents one the most important artistic experiments of the twentieth century—a harbinger of the digital era to come, and a precursor to the multiplication and interconnectedness of screens that characterize 21st century digital architectures. More than three thousand films were produced for the event. Moving pictures were presented in approximately 65 per cent of the pavilions and complexes, many of which dazzlingly displayed a new flexibility of the screen and the new synaesthesia of visual cultures of the world as mediated by technology in the 1960s. As film critic Judith Shatnoff described it, “Film came on two screens, on three, five, six, nine in a circle, 112 moving screen cubes, a 70mm frame broken into innumerable screen shapes, screens mirrored to infinity, a water screen (at the Kodak pavilion), a dome screen.…” New names were invented for these proliferating screens: Circle-Vision, Polyvision, Kino-Automat, Diapolyecran, Kaleidoscope. While the 1964 New York World’s Fair had presented dozens of multi-screen projections (including Glimpses of the USA, which was projected on fourteen screens at the IBM Pavilion), nothing compared to Expo 67 in terms of the reinvention of screens and theatres to accommodate new forms of projection and spectatorship.
Program I – Expo 67, Reconstructions and Other Finds (84 min running time)
Installation: Jenn E. Norton – Triodetic Vision
2016, Digital Video Loop 7 MIN
Motion
Vincent Vaitiekunas
1967, 70 mm digital transfer 14 MIN
We are Young
Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid
1967, 35mm digital transfer and 6 screen reconstruction, 20 MIN
The Earth is Man’s Home
Nick and Ann Chaparos
1967, 70mm digital transfer and 3 screen reconstruction, 10 MIN
Polar Life
Graeme Ferguson
1967, 35mm digital transfer and digital reconstruction of 11 Screens, 20 MIN
Man Belongs to Earth
Graeme Ferguson
1974, Imax 20 MIN