Magic in Montreal: The Films of Expo

Expo 67 is Celluloid City. In nearly every pavilion of Montreal's spectacularly successful world exhibition--more than 18 million visitors so far--the viewer is the ultimate target of a projector. Sometimes film flutters futuristically above or beneath him; sometimes images lurk and flicker all around him, caroming off walls, whirring on blocks and prisms, on hexagons and cruciforms. Sometimes movies are even mounted on a plain old rectangular screen--but everywhere there is film, film, film unreeling.

Inevitably, many of Expo's 3,000 movies are straightforward sales-promotion pitches, done with all the imagination of a headache-pill TV commercial. Russia and Israel, for example, may be a spectrum apart at the U.N., but at Expo, their threadbare cinema techniques are interchangeable. Israel pats itself on the back with its customary miracle-in-the-Negev approach. Russia shows a stupefying selection of dreary movies, including shorts featuring capering comrades at a Black Sea resort and bears playing ice hockey, which look like rejects from a FitzPatrick travelogue of the '30s. To make matters worse, some of the films come equipped with booming Russian sound tracks--but no subtitles.

Games Children Play. By contrast, the U.S. pavilion's A Time to Play, commissioned by the USIA, demonstrates a promising new technique and talent. Employing three screens simultaneously, Director Art Kane offers a portrait of the games children play. With the vision of a painter, he observes a group of kids as they run exuberantly, following the leader who jumps from screen to screen. He also explores the varied geometric patterns of hopscotch courts, and shows a group of boys fighting each other on a pyramid-like peak to be come. "King of the Hill." Kane's wittiest photography shows a contest of shadow tag seen from above. The children's heads are tiny, their shadows elongated and spidery, as the boy who is "it" proceeds to stamp them out, one by one. As his black sneaker hovers over the shadows, it seems like some malevolent predator, creating the mixed sense of excitement and dread that attends children at play.

The multiple-screen technique is a favorite of Expo's moviemakers. Great Britain's most important film, produced by James Archibald and directed by Donald Levy, is also shown on three screens, although here the trio frequently function independently. Only five minutes long, the movie attempts to portray the history of energy--first bursting from the sun, gradually disciplined and controlled by man. In fact, the film is little more than a series of violent images: arrows, acrobats, whirling lathes and ballet dancers, a time-lapse sunset, atomic explosions, water droplets in slow motion. Assaulted by three simultaneous images, the viewer is forced to become his own editor, selecting and retaining sense impressions as best he can --and emerging with a visual sense of energy that still remains unharnessed.

Oblongs & Squares. The Ontario pavilion subdivides its screen into as many as 15 geometric oblongs and squares, like a Mondrian painting, then shatters it into shards of indeterminate shapes that sometimes cooperate, sometimes compete with each other. As a portrait of a province, the film is less than full length; the footage of sailboats, jets and forests all but disappears beneath the glittering surface of the show's broken-screen technique.

Most film makers have used Expo's theme--"Man and His World"--to sanctify a marriage of convenience between formidable technique and flaccid story. But at the Labyrinth pavilion the theme is handled by Canada's prize winning National Film Board with solemnity and skill. In the vaulted chambers of a windowless, five-story building, the viewer follows a restatement of the Greek myth of Theseus, who entered a labyrinth on the island of Crete to slay the monstrous Minotaur. In the pavilion the labyrinth is evoked by a series of eerie corridors and chambers, including one auditorium where audiences peer down from galleries on a swimming pool-sized screen. At the same time, an oblong screen, 38 ft. high, confronts them at eye level. Sometimes Labyrinth uses the two screens to show off: a girl on the far screen throws a bit of bread away; it lands with a splash on the shimmering pond of the bottom screen. Most often it is employed to generate vertigo, as when a trapeze artist dangles above a crowd, or when two men have a highball-to-highball confrontation with a swiveling stripper.

Sonic Boon. Another chamber shows five screens arranged in the shape of a cross. In the most effective sequence, an African hunter peers out at the jungle, spear in hand, searching the waters for a crocodile. Around him the night seethes ominously. When at last he kills his quarry, the screens abruptly fill with white-eyed death masks that seem, for once, as terrifying to the viewer as they must be to the native. Labyrinth's narration is sometimes painfully portentous: "The hardest place to look is inside yourself, but that is where you will find the beast. . ." But for the most part it is a sonic boon, admirably understating Labyrinth's stunning visual display.

Some pavilions strive solely for immediate effect. In the style of the ancient sorcerers, the Kaleidoscope pavilion does it all with mirrors. To the accompaniment of mind-bending, discothque-loud cacophony, reflections of colors burst and bleed like paint blended in a mixer; flowers open in the sun, firecrackers explode, seagulls turn red against a green sky. A violent visual punhouse, Kaleidoscope is the medium, the message and the massage. It is probably as near as most viewers will get to a psychedelic trip; for most, it will be close enough for discomfort.

Planting the viewer firmly in the center of a vast circular auditorium, the Telephone Association pavilion shows him a 360DEG screen, then surrounds him with the sea, puts him in the middle of a hockey game, the Mounties on parade, Montreal's skyline, and a hundred other spectacular Canadian sights. The exhibit's faults are derived from its virtues. Except for the African chameleon, there are few living creatures who can see in back of their heads; in theory, a film in the round is a dazzling Disney process, but at any given moment, 180DEG of it are wasted.

Man Loves Factory. Although Canadian, British and U.S. films make strong showings at Expo, Czechoslovakia again emerges as Expo's, and possibly the world's, most formidable new film maker. Its most ambitious efforts are two multiple-projector movies, cum-brously named Polyvision and Diapolye-cran. Polyvision discards the idea of a screen, projects its images against a score of whirling spools, globes and spheroids. Again the form outstrips the content: what delights the eye is just another Iron Curtain version of the old love story of man and factory, uniting to turn out ingots, pencils and marzipan. Diapolyecran is a 32-ft. by 20-ft. mosaic composed of 112 huge cubes, each equipped with its own interior slide projector. Wittily presenting a pageant of primitive mammals, insects and Neanderthalers, it moves on to show modern man dwarfed by the machines he has produced. Appropriately, every movement of Diapolyecran has been programmed by computer.

Cubist Eyes. Without question, one of the most popular features of Expo is Czechoslovakia's Kino-Automat, which is as much an audience-participation show as is a happening. At the film, each member of the audience functions as a separate Caesar, deciding electronically which way the Tongue-in-Czech story should progress (TIME, May 5). The film itself is little more than an oddball triangle carried to a screwball extreme, but Director Josef Svoboda demonstrates his flair for Sennett-style comedy in a rousing custard-pie and fire-engine finale.

Stronger on imagination than realization, Expo's films offer the viewer the exploratory delight of watching a new kind of cinema in the process of being born. Much like the Fauves and Cubists of painting. Expo's directors and cameramen at their best seem to have found a new way of interpreting and reproducing the imagery of life. Much of the expertise has been expended on trompe-l'oeil techniques that clearly have no place in the commercial film of today, or even tomorrow. Yet such visual delights as Labyrinth and Kane's three-screened children suggest that cinema--the most typical of 20th century arts--has just begun to explore its boundaries and possibilities.

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