Terre des Hommes / Man and His World: Expo 67 as Global Media Experiment

Although it relied upon different media, the Montreal world’s fair—known as Expo 67—extended both Steichen’s humanist aspirations and Jacques Cousteau’s ecological ambitions by creating a planetary media experiment with a variety of screen and communication technologies. Indeed, Expo 67 boasted one of the first satellite-assisted world broadcasts for its opening ceremonies, just a few months after the BBC’s 1967 global satellite broadcast, Our World.⁵ Not surprisingly, both Steichen’s “Family of Man” (the traveling version) and Cousteau’s famous underwater saucer, the “soucoupe,” and unseen footage from his early underwater films, along with a live performance by a deep-sea diver in a water tank (located in the “Man in the Arctic Region” Pavilion) were iconic events presented at Expo 67.

The notion of the “biosphere,” developed by the Russian geochemist and mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky, which influenced both Buckminster’s geodesic dome and Marshall McLuhan’s notion of a “global theatre,”⁶ was a symbolic aspect of Expo 67’s environmentalism. This environmentalism was articulated through a number of architectural and media experiments at the exposition. Though Vernadsky spent many years developing the concept—he had worked on it since World War I—his account of the biosphere and the noosphere as a new planetary phenomenon of interconnection was not published in English until 1945. As I discussed in the second chapter, Vernadsky argued that “the evolution of living matter” had created a new, shared consciousness that would increasingly recognize the interdependence of human and nonhuman forms of life on the planet. Importantly, Vernadsky’s ideas were tied up with his research into nuclear energy, which he believed would be used to harness great energy for the world and to support world peace. These ideas were certainly central to the Science Dome at the Festival of Britain, but due to the theme of Expo 67—“Terre des Hommes / Man and His World”—energy was communicational, ecological, and ephemeral.

The theme “Terre des Hommes / Man and His World” was taken from the title of a 1939 novel by French writer and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, famous for his subsequent book The Little Prince (1944). Saint-Exupéry was a reserve pilot for the French military during World War II. His Terre des hommes won the grand prize from the Académie française in 1939, and an adaptation for an American audience published in the United States under the title Wind, Sand and Stars won the National Book Award. A memoir of his years flying over the African Sahara and the South American Andes as an airmail carrier for Aéropostale, the book’s chapters are united by Saint-Exupéry’s experiences of the earth’s various landscapes. The book’s most dramatic episode, based on Saint-Exupéry’s actual experience, is a plane crash in the Sahara; crashing somewhere between Benghazi and Cairo, Saint-Exupéry and his mechanic, André Prévot, barely survived. Near death, they were rescued by a Bedouin tribe. This experience so deeply moved Saint-Exupéry that it formed the center of his reflections on life, friendship, humanity, and peace, along with his conception of the earth’s diverse cultural and natural ecologies. This formative experience was, of course, a result of and mediated by the technology of aviation. Saint-Exupéry’s abstract view of space and disembodied experience of time was very different from that of wartime aerial photography that haunted Steichen. It was a humanist vision of a shared world, a world without borders, which perfectly encapsulated the sensibility of Expo 67’s whole-earth mentality.⁷

With attendance at just over fifty million, Expo 67 was one of the most successful world expositions ever held.⁸ Although it may well be true that world expositions serve as training grounds for commodity consumption in ways that “raise spectatorship to a civic duty,”⁹ Expo 67’s spectacular showcasing of audiovisual technologies distinguished it from all previous expositions. Space exploration and communications media (especially satellites and television) were one and the same at Expo 67. American film and media scholar Gerald O’Grady maintains that Expo 67 represented the most important artistic experiment of the twentieth century—a harbinger of the digital era to come, and a precursor to the multiplication and interconnectedness of screens that characterize twenty-first-century digital architectures.¹⁰ More than three thousand films were produced for the event, and several film festivals, including the Montreal Film Festival and a student film festival, were connected to it. Moving pictures were presented in approximately 65 percent of the pavilions and complexes, many of which dazzlingly displayed a new flexibility of the screen and the new synesthesia of visual cultures of the world as mediated by technology in the 1960s. As Judith Shatnoff has 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.”¹¹ 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 multiscreen projections (including Glimpses of the USA, which was projected on fourteen screens at the IBM Pavilion), nothing that had come before compared to Expo 67’s reinvention of screens and theaters to accommodate new forms of projection and spectatorship. In his book Remember Expo: A Pictorial Record, Canadian critic Robert Fulford commented that Expo 67 changed not the way films were made, but the way they were seen.¹²

This chapter deals first with the architectural conception and overall design of Expo 67 in terms of a postwar humanist approach to architecture and urban planning, and, second, closely examines one of the most complex of the multiscreen pavilions at the Expo—Labyrinth/Labyrinthe, designed by Colin Low and Roman Kroitor, both of whom were established documentary film directors at Unit B of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). With the Labyrinth project, Low and Kroitor proposed an audiovisual experience that they believed could—by creating a new medium—transform the future of cinema. This expanded form of cinema did, in fact, provide the basis for the subsequent development of IMAX, by Kroitor and Graeme Ferguson three years later for the Osaka Expo in 1970, and IMAX 3D, by Colin Low for the Vancouver Expo in 1986. Gene Youngblood theorized the new media language created by many of the film experiments at Expo 67 as “expanded cinema.”¹³ He argued that these expanded cinema experiments sought to create a communicative bond with viewers by using multiscreen technology to s(t)imulate a state of mind.

Like all world expositions, Expo 67 was driven by the broader economic and political interests of globalization.¹⁴ Yet perhaps the utopian energies of mondialisation¹⁵ were particularly strong at Expo 67 because it not only coincided with, but arguably, enabled the birth of Quebec nationalism. Inherent to Expo 67 as well was the emergence of a global ecology, informed by the technological humanism expressed in the utopian thinking of Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. Indeed, because of its emphasis on expanded media, Expo 67 was dubbed “McLuhan’s fair.”¹⁶

In terms of Karl Mannheim’s theory, discussed in the previous chapter, that utopian consciousness is “wishful thinking,” Expo 67 can certainly be read as a utopian undertaking: it was process-oriented, experimental, and pedagogical. Mannheim’s notion of utopian consciousness as “wishful thinking” dovetails nicely with Umberto Eco’s theory of expositions as “teaching machines,” a theory inspired by Expo 67. In a review of this exposition for the journal Dotzero, Eco differentiated modern expositions of nineteenth-century industrial society from the collections of an earlier era—royal and state collections, museums, Wunderkammers. Eco argues that these premodern collections can be seen to exhibit a kind of “apocalyptic insecurity,” guarding the past against impending oblivion by means of collecting.¹⁷ The expositions of the nineteenth century—a product of industrial capitalism in which commodities were displayed in order to be fetishized rather than exchanged or used—were, on the contrary, future-oriented. As Marx so astutely described it, in their displays of accumulated goods, the “mystical veil” of the commodity defined those early exhibitions.¹⁸ The expositions of the twentieth century went further, inventing a new form. While earlier fairs had broken ground in terms of architecture—the Eiffel Tower, the Crystal Palace, and the Ferris wheel, all of which negotiated coherent views for visitors amid vast displays of goods—the modern exposition used goods “as a pretext to present something else. And this something else [was] the exposition itself.” In other words, “the exposition exposes itself.”¹⁹ Architecture thus became the preferred medium with which to communicate national identity. The exhibition of national identity and economic strength has been the organizing principle for world’s fairs and expositions since their inauguration in England in 1851 in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry in All Nations, which was held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. This exhibition was a precursor to the modern museum as well as offering a global economic stage for the marketing of industrial commodities.

While Eco’s theory of expositions provides us with insights into the importance of architecture as a medium both utopian and pedagogical, it fails to grasp the uniqueness of Expo 67 as a “world city” which made an explicit link between media and urban space. It is the mixture of media and urban technology designed on a large scale that distinguishes the modern exposition, and Expo 67 in particular, as an ecstatic world. I define such a world in terms of its exorbitant nature, its potential or aspiration to be universal. As we saw in the previous chapter, although the Festival of Britain celebrated Britain and its history while also recognizing the importance of planning for the future in a globalizing world, its scope was narrowly defined. The Telekinema was extraordinary because it served to connect the people of Britain. Expo 67 as we shall see, took as its mandate the interconnectivity of the earth and transformed it into one world possessed by humans—Man and His World.

Humanism and Architecture

Some filmmakers who participated in Expo 67 offered a number of striking observations when interviewed over the course of a research project, “The Films of Expo 67,” between 2010 and 2013.²⁰ The first is that they did not regard the exposition as a commercial undertaking; indeed, as a Category One designation, it was not a commercial or specialized exposition but was intended for the international community. Consequently, many artists experienced it as the last great utopian exposition. Of course, commercial and government interests were present at Expo 67, but the fact that participating artists were not used by corporations to showcase their latest technology was conducive to experimentation.

Secondly, as Donald Theall’s report on the exposition’s media experiments highlights, Expo 67, unlike its predecessors, demonstrated in McLuhanesque fashion that “the medium is the message.” Theall, a professor of English at McGill University in Montreal at that time, and a longtime student and collaborator of McLuhan, was sensitive to the landmark nature of media at Expo 67. As a student of McLuhan at the University of Toronto in the 1950s, he participated in the Explorations seminar (1951–1953), a think tank inspired by the work of Sigfried Giedion and Harold Innis. As Theall notes, the Expo 67 theme “Terre des Hommes / Man and His World” was intended to foreground a new humanism made possible through technology. Quebec writer Gabrielle Roy, who assisted with the selection of the theme, maintained that it was concerned to express a collaborative and cooperative vision:

These words would be heard throughout the world, drawing people everywhere to the concept and vision of humanity united. … This would be its distinct and personal share in the common effort of the seventy-odd countries that would join with us to create Expo 67. The theme pavilions, with consistent emphasis on the idea of human interdependence would then form the hub of the great wheel of men and nations. We also wanted to invite the participating countries to collaborate on the theme itself. At any rate, since this was Man’s Earth, belonging to everyone, we thought it desirable that contributions to the project should blend, complement one another, forming one complete whole, like perfectly balanced instruments of an orchestra.²¹

Expo 67, not unlike “The Family of Man,” was divided into universal themes: “Man the Explorer,” “Man and His Community,” “Man and His Health,” “Man the Creator,” “Man the Producer.” But the unifying principle was not simply the world of Man; it was also Expo 67 itself as a city of the future—as a world city. Instead of multiple interpretations of an overarching theme, Expo 67 was designed as a “total environment; as a “city,” it was conceived as a total work of art or, as Henri Lefebvre characterized it at the time, as an oeuvre rather than a mere collection of pavilions. This oeuvre was the planet earth itself—terre des hommes; literally, man’s earth. Visitors to Expo 67 were issued passports instead of tickets to the event, which were stamped at the entrance to the various national and cultural pavilions, transforming attendees into global citizens. This global citizenship enabled visitors to experience the multiplicity of the world—a festival of cultures displayed through a diversity of foods, music, clothing, art, and cultural artifacts, alongside an extensive exhibition of public sculptures in the common spaces and rest areas throughout the site.²²

As a future-tense city, Expo 67 was described as cinematic, its structures made of webs and screens that refracted and reflected images, bodies in movement, and atmospheric variations. Indeed, its chief architect Edouard Fiset’s proposal—the “master plan design intent”—recommended that designers and architects explore new possibilities of webs and filmlike materials. Frei Otto’s groundbreaking tent architectures for the West German Pavilion, made with newly available polyester materials draped over a net of steel cables and held in place by eight columns, found an eloquent expression for this idea.²³ Otto, who like Fuller was a utopianist intent on making buildings for poor people in difficult circumstances, spent his career creating lightweight architecture. Because so many pavilions were constructed with such materials, creating structures that could be dismantled and transported, Expo 67 was called the “Space-Frame Fair.” This quality of the immaterial, the impermanent, the nonlinear, and the ephemeral gave Expo 67 its modern, futuristic sheen, which mirrored the recent, dematerialized commodity culture of North America.²⁴ The monumentality of earlier world expositions—described by Tom Gunning as “disposable imperial cities, expressing man’s dominance over the earth”—was thus not to be found at Expo 67.²⁵ Instead, we find the flexibility of a city in movement.

Unsurprisingly, transportation and the orchestration of traffic were key components of Expo 67’s plan, with trains linking vast areas of the complex site; a particular highlight was the entrance of the train into the geodesic dome. The train system presented a complicated network of movements and connections, operating at different heights and speeds, which offered riders a variety of views and vistas.²⁶ Expo 67’s thousand acres and two manmade islands (Île Notre-Dame and Île Sainte-Hélène), built on the Fleuve Saint-Laurent, constituted something unique in urban design. Albert Rorai’s internal report on “Architecture at Expo 67” highlights the comments of many critics on the beauty of the site: “To avoid the clutter typical of many exhibitions, and to create broad vistas, Expo has taken a town planning approach. Four separate areas were laid out, each having its own distinctive character. … Lakes, ponds, lagoons, and the Saint Lawrence divide the site, affording many varied perspectives. One feature of the site planning was the use of water, an element that gives visual unity to the diversity of the architecture and landscaping.”²⁷ Indeed, architects were required to use 40 percent of their sites for landscape to provide green space around and inside the exhibition. Unlike previous expositions, Expo 67 created a unified system of signs, designed by Paul Arthur, which both promoted and enacted a new global sensibility. This novel signage, along with urban furniture designed by Luis Villa (lighting, benches, phone booths, and trash cans), produced a distinct and unified visual culture.

Arthur, who had worked in Switzerland as an assistant editor at Graphis, an international journal of visual communication, in the 1950s, had moved into the emerging field of environmental graphics and way-finding in three-dimensional space when he returned to Canada. For Expo 67, he used a systems approach to graphics and signage, designing his signs according to the International Style in graphic typography, which had grown out of the Bauhaus’s New Typography.²⁸ Arthur’s conceptualization was also influenced by the work of Rudolph Modley, who had developed a practice of graphic design in the United States based on Otto Neurath’s psychological principles for a universal system of symbols.²⁹ Although Expo 67 helped to inaugurate Canada’s policy of bilingualism, officially adopted in 1969 (the word “Expo” was used because it compressed French and English), the exposition developed a system of icons that, in fact, minimized or superseded language.

Theall’s extensive report on Expo 67 argues that it was designed, in Bauhaus style, as a “total environment.”³⁰ As a city of the future, it encompassed the Constructivist principles laid out by Walter Gropius in “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses” (“The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus”): “The old dualistic world-concept which envisaged the ego in opposition to the universe is rapidly losing ground. In its place is rising the idea of a universal unity in which all opposing forces exist in a state of absolute balance. This dawning recognition of the essential oneness of all things and their appearances endows creative effort with a fundamental inner meaning. No longer can anything exist in isolation.”³¹ The Montreal fair manifested this holistic thinking in its reconstitution of the relation between screen and architecture—not only reconfiguring the screen as architecture, but importantly, using architecture as screen in order to effect “total architecture,” to use the term coined by Gropius and Bruno Taut in the 1920s. This approach to spatial planning, which was inspired by the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, incorporated all of the arts and crafts, and opened them up to the projections and imaginings of citizens. Thus, central to the humanism at the heart of Expo 67’s design aesthetic was the idea of an integrated environment—that is, one in which architecture extended beyond buildings into environments and screens that were inherently architectonic.

Classic depictions of dehumanization often position the cinema screen as precisely that which alienates humans from the social fabric of everyday life. Think, for example, of Fritz Lang’s massive screens in Metropolis (1927) or the “telescreen” in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949)—in both instances, social control is encapsulated by the image of the screen. Expo 67’s image of the screen, on the contrary, was not that of a closed circuit, but one of open, intercultural connectivities located in an excess of visual media: a plethora of experimental films that communicated through images and sounds rather than printed or spoken language.

Expo 67 reflected certain trends in international art and architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. As discussed in the previous chapter, these trends were first articulated at CIAM 8, the eighth meeting of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne. The congress, founded in Geneva in the late 1920s by Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, held its eighth iteration in 1951 in Hoddesdon just outside of London, England. Coinciding with the Festival of Britain, the congress addressed Europe’s postwar needs of redesigning and rebuilding war-torn cities. Town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt was one of the organizers of the congress, and was also involved in creating the town planning exhibit, “Live Architecture,” at the Festival of Britain. CIAM 8’s great contribution to the discourse on urban planning and, I would argue, to novel experiments in the urban media ecologies that were articulated at Expo 67 was to consider the space of the city as an interactive medium—a dynamic environment of interdependent parts. Expo 67 was an island city designed precisely for such interactive networks and forms of circulation between the built environment and media of all kinds—sound, television, photographs, and film.

Although Tyrwhitt did not participate directly in the planning of Expo 67 (she was advising on a new planning program in Singapore),³² she nevertheless served as a link between CIAM 8 and the exposition. She was a close collaborator with both McLuhan (as part of the 1951–1953 Explorations seminar studying media effects)³³ and architect John Bland, who was instrumental in designing the building in which Labyrinth/Labyrinthe, one of Expo 67’s major film events, was housed. Bland also mentored Moshe Safdie, the architect of Habitat, which along with R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and Frei Otto’s tent architecture were, without doubt, the central symbols of Expo 67’s humanist conception of integrated urban planning.³⁴ Just as the city was being reconceived as a dynamic interactive artwork, so too were media experiments being conceived in terms of networks and environments. This radical reconceptualization belongs to the rich history of the mutual influence of urban planning and media practices that we can trace back to the Bauhaus.³⁵ According to McLuhan, a new sense of “auditory” or “acoustic” space could be attributed to electric culture. In a letter to Tyrwhitt on May 11, 1964, McLuhan writes:

Last night I was reading Finnegans Wake pages 492 to 505. I thought at once of writing to Giedion about it. In these pages Joyce runs through the letters of the alphabet from A to Z as a social cycle. When he gets to Z, the cycle begins again. He explicitly indicates the return to primal undiscriminated auditory space, then begins again the discovery of the vertical plane and enclosed space and numbers and measurement. Joyce is quite explicit that as the alphabet ends its cycle we move out of visual space into discontinuous auditory space again. This he mentions as the return to “Lewd’s Carol,” that is, through the looking glass into the world of non-Euclidean space once more, lewd, ignorant, tribal, involved totally as in group singing. In his “Beginnings of Architecture” Giedion cites the evidence several times that there is no architectural enclosing of space before script. Giedion does not know why this should be. Visual space alone of all the space discriminated by our various senses is continuous, uniform and connected. Any technology that extends the visual power imposes these visual properties upon all other spaces. Our own return in the electric age to a non-visual world has confronted us suddenly with this tyrannical and usurping power of the visual over the other senses. Kevin Lynch doesn't understand this matter at all. My own phrase for city planning is that the city has become a teaching machine. The planner’s job is to program the entire environment by an artistic modulation of sensory usage. Art is a CARE package dispatched to undernourished areas or the human sensorium. What the artist has formerly done on a private entrepreneurial basis the planner now must do on a corporate or group basis. This is equally true of education and government. Instead of worrying about program content, the job is now to program the total sensorium.³⁶

McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man was about to be published, and certainly what he wrote in this letter to Tyrwhitt contains many of the ideas that he was putting forward in the book about media and space. There is a sense in what he wrote that with the multiscreen projects, filmmakers were reprogramming the human sensorium.

Mind-Expanding Screens

The relation between screen and architecture—the screen as architecture—was integral to the humanist design of Expo 67. Far from dehumanizing, Expo 67’s image of the screen was liberatory and expansive. Fuller, whose architecture was a revelation for many of Expo 67’s multiscreen experimenters,³⁷ wrote the wonderful introduction to Gene Youngblood’s book Expanded Cinema. Fuller’s planetary vision of “earth space” challenged the conventional, partitioned view of the earth as static parcels of property, a view based on a two-dimensional image of the world that excluded the space above the ground, that is, the universe. To that limited view, Fuller counterposed Einstein’s larger idea of a complex of frequencies, waves, broadcasts, and instantaneous communication within the context of a nonlinear universe. For Fuller, Youngblood’s book was important because it invoked the “Scenario-Universe principle”: “A scenario of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformative events.” Most valuable for its educational potential, synesthetic art such as that at Expo 67 promised to synchronize the senses and humankind’s knowledge in sufficient time to ensure “the continuance of the … Space Vehicle Earth.”³⁸ New ecological art forms would ultimately lead to the “Expanded Cinema University,” that is, to universal knowledge.

Fuller’s first successful geodesic dome was built in Montreal in 1950 by the Canadian division of the Fuller Research Foundation. After his dome’s “glittering career as a trade-fair pavilion,” the opportunity to return to Montreal inspired Fuller to create his most sensational dome—a three-quarter sphere with a 250-foot-diameter sealed with a transparent skin of acrylic glass panels. Retractable indoor sunshades, which controlled the light by means of a computer that adjusted them according to the sun’s position, made the dome into an active sculptural projection.³⁹ Inside the dome, large-scale paintings by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were installed alongside artifacts from an Apollo spacecraft (a space suit, a parachute, and parts of the craft itself). Importantly, a painting by Jasper Johns of Fuller’s icosahedral Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map—a map that does not distort the polar regions and that, like his dome, corresponds to the shape of the earth—helped to illustrate the vision of the earth represented by the dome.

Just as Fuller’s geodesic dome was designed for a world in movement (that is, for new forms of mobility), so too was synesthetic cinema designed for process-oriented, decentered experiences. The notion that film technology could create an expanded consciousness for the new age of simultaneity was repeated in a number of experiments at Expo 67. The cover story of the July 14, 1967, issue of Life magazine, “A Film Revolution to Blitz Man’s Mind,” described a revolution that “showed us the future”: “London’s Crystal Palace in 1851 did this with iron and glass architecture, the Paris 1889 fair with steam engineering, the 1904 St. Louis Fair with the auto. Expo 67 does it with film and, through images that assault the senses and expand the mind, explodes the world into a revolution in communications.”⁴⁰

Expo 67 offered a plethora of new forms of participatory multiscreen cinema. Canada 67, a film by Robert Baclay produced by Walt Disney Studios shown in the Telephone Pavilion, was among the most spectacular and nationalistic of these. Using a nine-camera apparatus (larger than any of Disney’s previous circular films) to create a 360-degree Circle-Vision screen, the spectacle enveloped 1,500 viewers at a time. Beginning on Canada’s East Coast with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Baclay’s twenty-two-minute film featured Quebec’s Winter Carnival, a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game, the Wild West, and many of Canada’s national parks. The Canadian Pacific-Cominco Pavilion’s We Are Young, by filmmakers Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid (who also made the award-winning film To Be Alive for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York), used six screens for a documentary about the trials and tribulations of life as a teenager. Polar Life, by Graeme Ferguson, featured eleven screens, three of which were visible at a time to viewers seated in the revolving theater set on one large turntable. Perhaps the most theatrical presentation, and certainly one of the most popular, was the Czechoslovakian pavilion’s Kino-Automat (Movie vending), which used three screens and incorporated live theater. Devised by cinematographer Raduz Cincera, Kino-Automat invited each audience member to vote on the actions to be taken by the characters in the film by pressing either a red or a green button in front of them. An actor from the film emerged on stage at various points and asked the audience to vote. The voting itself was a ruse, and although each putative vote offered two choices, all paths led to the same outcome. Cincera intended this illusion of interactivity as a comedic comment on democracy.⁴¹

Expanded cinema at Expo 67 also experimented with compression within the image. Christopher Chapman produced A Place to Stand, a film that compressed seven hours of filming into an 18-minute film. Optically printing multiple frames—as many as fifteen—inside one frame, Chapman created an innovative split-image film of tremendous beauty. The rhythmic juxtapositions of images of industry in Ontario created a new form of montage, garnering an Academy Award for Chapman and influencing numerous split-screen films of the period.

Figure 4.1 A still from Christopher Chapman’s 1967 film *A Place to Stand*, showcasing its “multi-image” effect. Credit: *A Place to Stand,* 17 mins, 70mm, color, English. Directed by Christopher Chapman. Produced by Christopher Chapman and David Mackay.

Many of the multiscreen filmmakers at Expo 67 developed complex working strategies for shooting and editing multiple-screen events. It is important to remember that these experiments were undertaken before the development of digital editing systems and the flexibility they provide. Chapman, for example, relied upon detailed sketches that juxtaposed sequences of images, visualizing how the materials would work together before sending them to a lab in Los Angeles where they were optically printed. Maquettes were built for many of the projects in order to experiment with projection and to anticipate effects. Ferguson built a special slide rule that enabled him to foresee what audiences would see in his eleven-screen theater. While the films at Expo 67 did indeed change the way films were seen, they also changed the way they were made.⁴²

Influenced by both McLuhan and Fuller, as well as by the multiscreen experiments at Expo 67, Gene Youngblood posited synesthetic cinema as a new, revolutionary art form. In the age of “cosmic consciousness,” in which intuition and reason were joined once more,⁴³ Youngblood theorized that the role of cinema was to approximate consciousness, which he defined, in accordance with the philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood’s specification, as “the kind of thought which stands closest to sensation or mere feeling.” All thought, according to Collingwood, grows out of sensation and “deals with feeling as thus transformed into imagination.”⁴⁴ Not simply static, consciousness was understood to be in the process of expanding through technology; as Youngblood put it, “This consciousness expansion is created on the one hand by mind manifest hallucinogens and on the other by a partnership with machines.” Synesthetic cinema, “with its multi-dimensional simulsensory network of information sources,” provided the only language suited for a postindustrial, postliterate age. An increasing number of people, wrote Youngblood, were living in another world, and synesthetic cinema belonged to that countercultural world, a world that was “other” to commercial media.⁴⁵

The multiscreen form had existed at the turn of the twentieth century. One of silent cinema’s most monumental and extraordinary attempts to deconstruct the colonizing effects of monocular vision was Abel Gance’s Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (1927). Gance’s spectacular Polyvision—superimpositions and multiple frames within frames, for example, projected across three screens—sought to delinearize and extend cinema’s sensational spatial and temporal capabilities and, at the same time, to problematize historical narration. It embodied a field of vision that gathered together vast heterogeneous spaces under the rubric “vu par.” Separate from the history they recount, the images typify the “art of film” and foreground the visionary “auteur” at the height of cinematic expressionism.⁴⁶

We may well wonder why multiscreen experiments such as those mounted at Expo 64 in New York, and especially Expo 67, reappeared so forcefully in the 1960s. The answer is simple, according to Youngblood: “television is the software of the earth.”⁴⁷ Rendering film obsolete as a documentary technology, television both shifted film into and helped to consolidate the “intermedia network” of magazines, books, radio, recorded music, and photography. Cinema screens became architectonic because of television’s self-reflexive ubiquity—televisual images have no outside or inside: “The videosphere is the noosphere transformed into a perceivable state.”⁴⁸ It is not that the screen disappeared; rather, the screen as support was materialized as an object alongside or within another screen, ad infinitum.

From his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy onward, McLuhan argued that the media of the postwar period had created a new “electric” environment. If the “medium is the message,” the screen, and the building that houses the screen, and the city that houses the theater are all part of the ever-expanding and imploding picture of the earth that Sputnik had delivered to television screens across the world. Though there were screens within screens in the history of cinema, multiple screens and video walls became a common prop in the popular (especially American) television culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Science fiction space-travel programs and spy serials often used television monitors to connote the surveillance and high-tech control of space.⁴⁹ This use of the screen marked a fundamental shift in the popular imaginary toward understanding simultaneity as space to be controlled. In War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan declared: “As visual space is superseded, we discover that there is no continuity or connectedness let alone depth and perspective.”⁵⁰ Space thus becomes acoustic (space-time). While the filmmakers of the Labyrinth project sought to control simultaneity, they also aimed to give filmgoers a profound mind-altering experience of it.

Labyrinth/Labyrinthe (the Film)

The idea of cinema as environment was intrinsic to the Labyrinth project. Unlike other film events at Expo, the film Labyrinth boasted its own specialized building and environment. The influence of television on the NFB’s Unit B directors, including Colin Low and Roman Kroitor, is well known. The shift from theatrical to nontheatrical distribution of NFB films in the early 1950s began a relationship with television that would change the way documentaries were made. Not only was there a need for more films, but they also had to be produced more rapidly. The NFB was faced with increasing demand for material that explored everyday Canadian realities. Essentially, when the Film Board began to produce content for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Unit B in particular, beginning with The Candid Eye series, started to make short documentaries for television. These films, akin to Kracauer’s “found stories”—stories with an “anonymous” core and without beginning, middle, or end ⁵¹—were heavily influenced by the realist aesthetics of Henri Cartier-Bresson, according to which everyday life is revealed photographically and phenomenologically in a “decisive moment.”⁵²

Figure 4.2 An exterior view of a crowd lining up outside of the Labyrinth Pavilion before a screening at Expo 67. Credit: In the Labyrinth © 1979 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

One fact that often goes unrecognized is the NFB’s substantial technological innovations in the areas of sound recording, film cameras, and projection.⁵³ All of these contributions were geared toward greater mobility of the camera, for both animation and live-action shooting, and greater mobility of film exhibition. One of the most important innovations in this “quest for mobility,” as Gerald Graham has called it, was the synchronous sound-recording technology produced in 1955, which enabled greater flexibility in location shooting and helped to consolidate the NFB’s reputation in direct cinema.⁵⁴ The second and equally important innovation, pioneered for Expo 67, was the development of large-screen projection using 70mm and 35mm film, which eventually evolved into IMAX’s 70mm film projection. For the Labyrinth project, the NFB constructed a synchronous multicamera shooting apparatus—five Arriflex cameras mounted in a cruciform shape. The cameras could be operated together in various combinations. The films were then projected using five synchronized projectors arranged in a similar configuration. Both the camera and projection apparatuses adapted the principles of television-studio switching technology to enable greater flexibility in filming simultaneous actions.

Thus, the NFB’s innovations expanded cinema in two distinct ways. Their innovation in sound recording expanded the content within the frame; no longer tied to the studio, the camera and sound-recording apparatus were set free to document the outside world, thereby collapsing the division between outside and inside. Their second innovation, which built on the first, was the expansion of the screen itself, which set the spectator free, immersing him or her in a new cinematic architecture that offered multiple and individualized views on screens that exceeded any one person’s perspective or viewing capacity.⁵⁵ Both of these innovations resulted in greater participation by and interactivity between filmmakers and spectators. Without doubt, this increased mobility and expansion, the opening up of new spaces of apprehension, was tied to the contradictory forces of capitalist media expansion in general, which simultaneously produced greater democracy in image production and consumption, and greater social and economic control of images themselves. This consolidation of media ownership is nowhere more visible than in the twenty-first-century multiplatform environments—which give viewers greater choice in the context of a fierce media oligopoly.

Both Low and Kroitor believed that the synesthetic cinema they designed for Expo 67 constituted a new medium that could revolutionize visual culture. Labyrinth originated from Colin Low’s idea for an in situ film: “The audience walks through a door into a darkened room and everything is subdued. Suddenly, the room lights go out and they are standing on a glass floor looking down 1,000 feet into the middle of Montreal.”⁵⁶ The first image was this aerial view of the city above which the audience was suspended in space. Although the experiment didn’t quite work (the sense of immersion the filmmakers wanted was not achieved), the entire structure of Labyrinth evolved from this idea of space travel, an idea they had pioneered in their earlier award-winning animated film, Universe (1960). Stanley Kubrick was so impressed by Universe that he invited Low to work on the design for his film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). However, Low was unable to participate in Kubrick’s film as he was then occupied with the Labyrinth project, which included the design of the building, the design of the different cameras and editing systems, and the overall interior design, and finally Kubrick’s film took five years to make.⁵⁷

Low had been interested in a 1958 novel by Mary Renault, The King Must Die, a popular reworking of the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature that lived inside the labyrinth of Crete. By unspooling Ariadne’s thread, Theseus made his way through the labyrinth and slayed the Minotaur.⁵⁸ In consultation with Northrop Frye, Low and Kroitor used the story as a frame for a narrative about self-realization, wherein the beast to be conquered dwells within each of us. Their aim was to produce a “ritual” or “artistic” experience, to create a “state of mind.” Like “The Family of Man,” the Labyrinth project was based on and directed toward the commonalities shared by humankind. Low and Kroitor’s production notes describe their methodology:

We are making a pictorial labyrinth of “life,” as it now is on this planet. In a labyrinth, the point is to choose the path that leads to the goal, i.e., to avoid the false turns, the cul-de-sacs. In life, there is no way of knowing beforehand what these false turns may be before one gets into them. There is no royal road to wisdom. Only experience can teach that, if it ever does. The labyrinth we are making is therefore not with the point; “do this” or “do that.” The only “guide” there can be in life is a state of mind. … The point of the labyrinth is the discovery that such a state of mind exists. In order that this discovery can take place (to whatever degree), a journey is undertaken, in “ritual” form. By ritual form is meant that the participant partakes of certain experiences, but is not actually personally involved in them.⁵⁹

The Labyrinth project thus adopted a “common” or “proto” story, structuring it as stages that corresponded to various “states of being,” which the exhibition was designed to induce in its viewers.

Acting as a consultant to the project, Northrop Frye attended meetings at various stages of the project’s development, and several of his essays appear alongside Tom Daly’s production notes (Daly was the Labyrinth project’s film editor). An excerpt from Frye’s newly published book Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology sheds some light on the objective of “artistic” experience. Referring to poet Wallace Stevens’s speculations on the imagination, Frye explains that art is “a unity of being and knowing, existence and consciousness, achieved out of the flow of time and the fixity of space.”⁶⁰ With its emphasis on multiplicity and facticity, Stevens’s poetry illuminates the simultaneity and experiential quality of synesthetic cinema. These aspects are palpable in Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.⁶¹

So, too, the logic of the coming together of temporal flow and spatial fixity was manifested in the merging of architecture and cinema.

The architecture designed to house the multiscreen presentation was itself a labyrinth—a five-story, poured-concrete edifice with two viewing theaters (Chamber 1 and Chamber 3). Intended to effectuate disorientation and reflection, a transitional zigzag space—called “The Maze”—linked them. Working with John Bland’s architectural firm, which also included Roy E. LeMoyne, Gordon Edwards, and Anthony Shine, with Harry Vandelman as project supervisor, Colin Low designed the building. The entire space was able to accommodate approximately 720 people at a time, and there were ten shows a day. The viewer’s path through the space represented the thread of a person’s life, from childhood through old age. The Expo 67 guidebook promised a visceral and unforgettable experience:

They [the spectators] will be distributed in groups through the three chambers, and at one stage will be surrounded by reflected images on all sides. At another point, they will gaze down from ramps on a huge screen 40 feet below and be subjected to sensations so strong that some will want to grab the handrail. Film for Labyrinth has been specially shot by cameramen in many countries. There are no name stars to this movie—the main character is Man! In the second chamber, visitors move along walkways set between mirrored glass prisms. In the final chamber, the audience faces a multi-screen battery of unparalleled scope—using five screens, so that areas of the mind are exercised that almost certainly have not been exercised before.⁶²

Labyrinth proved to be one of the most popular highlights of Expo 67, with audiences waiting for up to seven hours to see the forty-five-minute screening.⁶³

Figure 4.3 An interior view of the audience watching one of two fifty-foot screens in the first chamber of the Labyrinth Pavilion. Credit: In the Labyrinth © 1979 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Figure 4.4 During a screening in Chamber 1, the audience watches a film from the venue’s four stacked rows of elliptically shaped balconies. Credit: In the Labyrinth © 1979 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Chamber 1: Childhood, Confident Youth (70mm x 2)

The theater in the first chamber of the Labyrinth Pavilion was designed in a horseshoe formation, with the two screens arranged in an L shape, one vertically and the other horizontally. From four tiers of balconies on both sides of the chamber, viewers gazed out at a vertical screen that rose forty feet in height and looked down at a long horizontal screen on the floor. Five independent sound systems and 288 smaller speakers throughout the theater ensured that the sound amplified the visual and spatial effects, and intensified the sensation of vertigo induced by having to look both up and down at the images. In fact, Chamber 1 so powerfully reproduced sensations of moving through space that NFB officials worried that the film might arouse anxiety, depression, or even suicidal feelings.⁶⁴ No such thing happened, but the possibility, of course, increased the excitement surrounding each screening.

Chamber 2: The Maze

“The Desert,” also known as “The Maze,” was to be, as Frye suggested, like “the city on a hot summer day.”⁶⁵ Journalist Wendy Michener described the experience of it as akin to an “acid trip.”⁶⁶ According to its designer, Colin Low, “[t]he maze was three prisms in an octagonal room full of mirrors on all the walls, floor and ceiling. The prisms were made of partial-silvered glass so when the lights were on the audience, it would be the audience reflected back to itself, and when the lights went off the audience and came on in the prisms, it made an infinity of stellar lights. A cosmos.”⁶⁷ A zigzagging passageway of mirrored glass, the maze featured an experimental soundtrack of electronic and animal sounds that triggered a multiplicity of flashing lights, which were reflected and transmitted by the glass. The installation was meant to disorient viewers, to dissolve boundaries between identities, between human and nonhuman, creating an endless, acoustic, decentered space. When briefly illuminated, a spectator’s reflected image was dispersed across an infinity of spaces by the mirrors. Traversing the intimate corridor, viewers entered the final phase of their journey.

Figure 4.5 A couple pauses in Chamber 2’s mazelike passage to examine the structure’s two-way mirrors through which they can see thousands of small lights. Credit: In the Labyrinth © 1979 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Chamber 3: Death/Metamorphosis (35mm x 2)

The third and final chamber resembled a standard cinema, with conventional theater seating. However, the images were projected onto five screens arranged in a cruciform shape—a reference to the tree of life—creating a stunning visual climax. Each of the films produced for Chambers 1 and 3 presented images from half a dozen countries and ran close to twenty minutes long. Including all ages, races, and genders, the films focused on cultural rituals and everyday gestures throughout the world: a crocodile hunt in southern Ethiopia, a baptism in Greece, a childbirth in Montreal, a ballet lesson in Russia, Montreal streets during a snowstorm, a traffic officer, commuters, landscapes. The soundtracks of both films included snippets of voice-over, recorded location sound, and a score composed by NFB staff composer, Eldon Rathburn. For each film, Tom Daly devised a special system of vertical editing that juxtaposed lengthy unedited sequences so as not to “oversaturate” viewers with too much information.⁶⁸ Therefore, scenes were sometimes continuous across several screens; in Chamber 1, for example, a boxer fell to the ground, dropping from the vertical screen onto the horizontal screen below. In another sequence, a child appearing on the upper screen fed a goldfish swimming on the lower screen. Actions were fragmented and repeated across multiple screens. Colin Low itemized the new compositional possibilities offered by this technology, declaring that the “ultimate image” would no doubt be “electronic, with stereoscopic images, perhaps … holograms”:

(1) flexibility in alteration of image composition;

(2) simultaneous representation of events:

(a) different events occurring at different times or in different locations

(b) different time segments of the same event, and

(c) the same event seen from different positions and points of view;

(3) enrichment of image by juxtaposition of several elements of the same event or location;

(4) possibility of a kind of visual metaphor or simile; and

(5) representation of two or more events converging and merging into a single event or a single event fragmented into several images.⁶⁹

Mentored by the NFB’s chief animator, Norman McLaren, who had hired him as a summer intern in the animation department in the early 1950s, Low had earlier done extensive research into 3D film. Having produced a 3D film for the Festival of Britain in 1951, McLaren, according to Low, was “obsessed” with 3D and believed that it would prove to be the future of cinema.⁷⁰ Though the multiscreen cinema was not 3D, its principal aesthetic quality was stereoscopic—in other words, it offered simultaneity in an expanded field. As McLuhan, likely referring to the multiscreen experiments at Expo 67, wrote: “Multi-screen projection tends to end the story-line, as the symbolist poem ends narrative in verse. That is, multiple screens in creating a simultaneous syntax eliminate the literary medium from film.”⁷¹

Figure 4.6 Early tests conducted with Labyrinth’s cruciform screen in an airplane hangar rented by the National Film Board of Canada, 1966. Credit: In the Labyrinth © 1979 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Labyrinth’s producers understood the synesthetic medium of multiscreen cinema as a new language, capable of accessing the unconscious mind and releasing associations deeply buried in the human psyche. And multichannel soundtracks helped to create focal points in relation to the “total image.” Indeed, the multi-image was conceived as sound, that is, as boundless, simultaneous, and multidirectional. Sound had liberated the image from the constraints of the single screen, but multiple screens merged images “in the same way it is possible to merge sounds.”⁷² The image in the multiscreen cinema is liberated not only from the single screen, but also from the constraints of traditional forms of drama, story, and plot. For Youngblood, this represented the natural evolution of the cinema. Synesthetic cinema transcended old forms of language just as television transformed the earth into software. The reflexivity of television brought everything, including the act of viewing, into a world of simultaneous becoming.⁷³

Figure 4.7 A view of Chamber 3’s unprecedented viewing experience that presents the audience with five 35mm projections arranged in a cruciform, which was meant to represent the tree of life. Credit: In the Labyrinth © 1979 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

English architectural critic Reyner Banham described Expo 67 as a megacity,⁷⁴ and the Labyrinth theater, which the NFB described as replete with “mechanical movement, a multiplicity of levels, emphasis on fun or ludic experiences, people in complex environments, and information saturation,” exhibited all of the megacity’s spatial attributes. A master programmer strictly controlled traffic flow, which was organized “like a sausage machine,” as Youngblood put it.⁷⁵ Given that movement was so thoroughly orchestrated, one might wonder how the Labyrinth theater was able to function as a space of drift and imagination that exercised generally unused areas of the brain. Yet it was the space between the theaters and the maze—in the multiplicity and arrangement of screens and mirrors, and in the extensive range of documentary information—that created the opportunity for audience participation. It was there that the senses were stimulated; the mind invited to wander and encouraged to peruse manifold paths of possibility, which required the use of both memory and imagination. There, synesthetic cinema and flânerie came together in the future city, as Youngblood explained it:

We have learned that synesthetic cinema is an alloy achieved through multiple superimpositions that produce syncretism. Syncretism is a total field of harmonic opposites in continual metamorphosis: this metamorphosis produces a sense of kinesthesia that evokes in the inarticulate consciousness of the viewer recognition of an overall pattern event that is in the film itself as well as the subject of the experience. … A mythopoetic reality is generated through post stylization of unstylized reality.⁷⁶

The Labyrinth Pavilion’s design was not conceived merely as a way to incorporate multiple screens; rather, it aimed at the creation of a fluid space in which viewing would become a transformative, “artistic” activity. Low spent considerable time designing the mezzanine area, which included several dramatic displays of historical labyrinths. Moreover, the material space of viewing and the act of viewing were understood as integral parts of the films. All of these elements constituted Labyrinth’s temporal dynamic, which was manifested as a theatrical performance of expanded screens and intermediality—the merging of screen and architecture. Even the pavilion’s exit was conceived and designed in these terms—audience members exited with a view of the Fleuve Saint-Laurent. In keeping with the humanist spirit of Labyrinth, this final view also included architect and urban designer Moshe Safdie’s utopian vision, Habitat.

Of central importance to the overall success of Expo 67 and an inherent aspect of its utopian energies was the sudden visibility of Quebec’s distinct cultural identity, and with it, a burgeoning national movement. This was especially true when Charles De Gaulle made the fateful statement, “Vive le Québec … Vive le Québec libre.” This period in Quebec’s history has been characterized as the Quiet Revolution / la révolution tranquille. The French language was foregrounded at Expo 67 (the majority of the exposition’s hosts were young Francophones), and the city of Montreal was then undergoing a massive architectural transformation that highlighted its cosmopolitan character.⁷⁷ Several documentary films produced about Expo 67 have made the observation that it suddenly allowed French Quebec, which had been “held back” by conservative Catholicism, to become visible on a technologically advanced world stage.

Cultures of DIY and Speed

There were at least two contradictory and interrelated experiences of media at Expo 67: the highly specialized architectonics of cinema spectatorship, and amateur-made media, especially photography/filmmaking. There was, on the one hand, a celebration of the new performative, multisensory aspects of the projected image onto a diversity of large screens and in particular the multiscreen presentation. While 3D film was present at Expo 67, the big innovation as I have been exploring was the multiscreen film—filmmakers (for Labyrinth and Kaleidoscope, for example) spoke of “detuning” the physical effects of the cinema projections by editing down the images and changing the sound to avoid oversaturating audiences. The new multiscreen film was seen as a medium that would reshape the human sensorium. As Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid, the makers of the six-screen film We Are Young, explain in their 1966 pamphlet Expanding Cinema,

[t]he use of multiple screen opens up responses in ways formally restricted to sculpture and painting. The multiple screen operates in two basic ways: 1) it enlarges a single panoramic picture area to more nearly envelop the audience, thereby causing them to share almost physically the world through which the film moves and unfolds its story; 2) it projects different images side by side in carefully worked out juxtapositions to produce a variety of results, such as revealing human universality beneath superficial cultural differences.⁷⁸

This universality may seem to be at odds with the new forms of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture that opened up the participatory spaces of conviviality and spontaneous expression which CIAM urban planners and architects had been advocating since the 1940s. Indeed, there is another story that could be told about Expo 67’s smaller screens, which, like the enormous multiscreen installations, broke down the division between production and consumption. A random sampling of these films are available on YouTube, many of which were shot on Super 8, the automatic-load camera that had replaced regular 8mm as the first affordable recording technology of choice in 1965. The films all tend to look alike, simply because they share a certain visual professional discipline as anonymous documentations of buildings, with crowds moving through the carefully manufactured views without the expressive intimacy or focus on the family that would give them a distinguishing mark. At Expo 67, Kodak Canada advertised the new Super 8 camera with an elaborate water screen through which “pictures [appeared to] grow … out of nowhere,” and offered to teach people how to shoot the exposition in a professional manner, that is, by making the filmmaker invisible.⁷⁹ Kodak’s rival Polaroid instigated a very undisciplined look through its outmoded black-and-white film (which Eastman Kodak actually produced from 1963 to 1969), as well as its 1966 launch of the Swinger camera—a perfect technology of mobility, mutability, and portability marketed especially to a young generation picturing itself active and on the move. Ali MacGraw was featured walking along the beach in a bikini with her Swinger camera—“It’s more than a camera, it’s almost alive. It’s only $19.95,” the commercial proclaimed.⁸⁰

McLuhan saw the multiscreen events and smaller forms of recording at Expo 67 as being perfectly commensurate with a new participatory way of engaging with the world. As he stated in a 1967 CBC interview before his participation in BBC’s satellite broadcast Our World: “What is happening today around the world is what is happening at Expo. A huge mosaic has been created which is in effect a kind of X-ray of world cultures. Not a storyline, not a perspective, not a point of view but a kind of X-ray through this mosaic is created in which everybody can participate. Everybody is surprised at Expo at how deeply they appreciate and participate in the show. No one seems to realize why it is so unlike other world fairs.”⁸¹ The X-ray is how McLuhan describes television; the avisuality of the X-ray is all part of an auditory space, a characteristic of the “centre-without-margins” mediated world of 1950s live television that was the zeitgeist of Expo 67.

Indeed, the aesthetics of the multiscreen films, the small gauge movie cameras, and television shared a similar processual sui generis. As Thompson and Hammid state in “Expanding Cinema,” multiscreen films represented a return to painting and sculpture not because they are rendered motionless, but because they bring emotional and temporal impact back to the art of cinema by connecting the spectator to the physical and material space of the film. Indeed, like an X-ray, the multiscreen film, they suggest, penetrates beneath superficial differences between people, to foreground their essential oneness in a new nonperspectival, non-Euclidean space.

Writing for Print magazine in 1970 the communications designer Logan Smiley pondered the future of multiscreen technology:

the next breakthrough in multi-screen may involve Super 8 and the consumer film market. Kodak could well see enormous gain in creating a marketing program which would, in effect, set up seminars at department stores, universities and film retail outlets to promote multi-screen for home use. It would be easy enough to do and would certainly challenge the uniscreen efforts of the professionals whose material is growing increasingly tiresome in plot and technique. These seminars would also sell four times as much film for Kodak—theoretically that is.⁸²

While this development of the medium for the home market might, as Smiley suggests, have presented a challenge to the “tiresomeness” of television and traditional forms of cinema and have had economic benefits for Kodak (at a time the company was enjoying its greatest profits from the very same home market), there was nevertheless something confusing about Smiley’s proposal. His description of spectacular multiscreen experiments seems to contradict the simplicity of the do-it-yourself program of home use. He cites the documentary Woodstock (1970), which used “five synchronous Graflex projectors, … four-track stereophonic sound, … and three film editors,” as the most successful utilization of multiscreen technology,⁸³ making his suggestion that it could be done in one’s backyard seem completely misguided. Yet Smiley’s proposal conveys a sense that the technologies might, or should, become available to the home market. His desire to find a wider application for the new medium, and indeed his suggestion that multiscreen might become the new home movie format, indicate an understanding that, as cinema expanded, so might the world. He intuitively grasped that these technologies (or others, such as “punch tape” or “cybernetic-like solar cell buttons”) were transforming cinema into complex forms that would enable us to simultaneously inhabit multiple realities.

After Expo 67, Colin Low left the multiscreen project just as it was preparing to launch as a commercial technology at the 1970 Osaka exposition. Roman Kroitor, along with Graeme Ferguson, went on to redevelop it as the large, single-screen technology known as IMAX. Low moved to the NFB’s antipoverty program, Challenge for Change. A citizens’ action-media experiment that began on Fogo Island in Newfoundland in 1968, this community-based project used 16mm, Super 8, and video to foster intercommunity communication among the islanders, and between the islanders and federal government agencies.⁸⁴ Such a project resonated powerfully with the media revolutions that were taking place elsewhere, particularly in France during the events of May 1968. The future of the audiovisual revolution, for Low, lay not only in IMAX (which he was still involved with) but in the small screens, the do-it-yourself technologies of video and community-based television that enabled greater citizen participation and democratic expression. While the synesthetic multiscreen cinema did not grow into the revolutionary medium many hoped for, one can see in the expanded-screen experiments at Expo 67 a foreshadowing of the intermedia networks, the mobility of images, and the cultures of the Internet, along with the concomitant multiplication of screens that now pervade everyday life in industrialized cities around the world.

Notes

14. With the creation of the Bureau International des Expositions (International Exhibitions [BIE/IEB]) in 1928, an intergovernmental body intended to schedule and regulate world exhibitions and fairs, ninety-two countries agreed: “The Exposition ‘official’ or ‘officially recognized exhibition’ shall be deemed to include every display, whatever its designation, to which foreign countries are invited through the diplomatic channel, which is not generally held periodically, of which the principal object is to demonstrate the progress of different countries in one or several branches of production, and in which, as regards admission, no distinction is made in principle between buyers and visitors” (International Convention Relating to International Exhibitions, Paris, 1928). Expo 67 was a Category One designation, the first of its type to be held in North America.