I originally posted this as a Facebook Note back in 2014,. It makes sense here, however, as part of the 500 people, places and things to define Jim Shedden. Also, I’ve had reason to think about the Expo 67 films + the Eames’s film installations lately. Here goes:
Film #3: A Place to Stand. (Christopher Chapman, 1967.)
I frequently declare that my first memory in life was hearing "Ring of Fire" in our living room on 30 Pixley Cr.
A close second, or even a #1 contender, has to be watching A Place to Stand at the Ontario Pavilion at Expo 67. I was three years old, a month or two away from turning four. I've always been able to recall memory fragments of that trip: the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome - the US Pavilion - that eventually burned down; a few rides; possibly Michael Snow’s Expo Walking Woman; and then a handful of "expanded cinema" pavilions.
A number of researchers at York University did a project on the “expanded cinema” features at Expo 67, describing the works presented there as: “the most important films to have disappeared from the Canadian film canon. These seven multi-screen productions challenged both the cinema production technology of the day, modes of screening, audience reception as well as the received wisdom as to what cinema was or could be. Roman Kroitor, Colin Low and Tom Daly’s Labyrinth Pavilion – a five story building designed around two multi-screen productions – has been described as the “last, and most complete, statement of the collective humanist ethos of the NFB’s Unit B” (Morris). Michel Brault’s Settlement and Conflict and Charles Gagnon’s The Eighth Day were major works by two of the most gifted Canadian filmmakers of the day. Graeme Ferguson’s Polar Life and Christopher Chapman’s A Place to Stand demonstrated the potential for large screen cinema exposition that Ferguson and Kroitor would shortly thereafter develop as IMAX. Two other multi-screen productions – Canada 67 and Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid’s We Are Young – contributed to a growing body of alternative cinema widely seen as the future of the medium.”
It’s hard to know with early memories how real they are or how after the fact information leads one to reconstruct them as memories. It’s a little of both here for me, but I have to say that I don’t entirely believe that my memories are true memories.
And yet when I look at A Place to Stand in these very substandard representations, I remember the experience of the film very clearly. Here’s Part One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt-5tAWJxvU. And here’s Part Two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shc36l-6p_Y.
Now, the AGO owns a 16mm print of the film but all the years that I was the film curator, I’m not sure that I ever once screened it. I was tempted because of my fond memories of the piece and films like it, but I always felt that a 16mm print would be depressing, given that it was made in 70mm and like the other films at Expo 67, anticipated Imax. There may have been one exception where I broke down and looked at it, but maybe not. The irony of me so easily taking it on on YouTube isn’t lost on me by the way.
Maybe I also saw the film at the Ontario Place Cinesphere as well, but I can’t imagine that they gave up screen time in those early years to anything but full-on IMAX films, from North of the Superior to everything that followed.
Maybe we saw it on the portable Bell & Howell in 16mm in our classrooms. That’s more likely.
The point is I remember it well and I love pretty much everything about it. It, and the other films at Expo 67, seemed to have planted a seed in me making me appreciate that films might:
have polyphonic image tracks
might not be narrative
might be experienced primarily viscerally
might be optimistic
might be a way of celebrating the natural and the built environments, not to mention “man and his world”
might be propaganda
might be without dialogue
might have music tracks that place them in a very particular place and time
might be installed as part of larger environments
Specifically, I remember loving the multiple frames, and remember it in fact as multiple projections (which it’s not). Not only are there multiple frames, but the number of frames, and the size of the frames varies, and the frames themselves sometimes move while moving images are taking place within them.
I loved all this elegant visual complexity. It totally predetermined my interest in avant-garde films that I would come to love as a young adult.
I definitely remember A Place to Stand. I also know that I saw other installations there, but I’m not as clear about them. The Labyrinth feels pretty familiar though. According to the York scholars, “Labyrinth/Labyrinthe
(the French title is occasionally used in English language writing about it) was an Expo pavilion produced by the National Film Board of Canada under the direction of Roman Kroitor. It was commissioned as part of the exposition’s theme, Man the Hero and designed around the myth of the minotaur. The Pavilion contained three chambers, the first and third of which were screening venues. In Chamber One, audiences stood in four stacked rows of elliptically shaped balconies to watch a two -screen film. The work was projected on 50 foot (15 meter) screens, one placed horizontally along the floor and the other horizontally at the far end of the chamber. The two sets of 70mm images were screened in a horizontal aspect ratio. The shots in the two separate films were edited so as to provide reflective images of a loosely structured universal life story (e.g. the often reproduced image of a baby on the floor screen with a father looking down at the baby projected onto the wall screen). Between the two chambers, the audience moved through a labyrinth-like passage constructed of two way mirrors through which they could see thousands of small light bulbs. Emerging from that labyrinth, the audience was ushered into a conventional auditorium. In this third chamber they were shown a multi-screen film, projected on five screens arranged in a cruciform. The film, co-directed by Kroitor, Colin Low, and Hugh O’Connor and edited by Tom Daly, used a variety of images shot in various global locations (e.g. the African jungle, the GUM department store in Moscow, the funeral of Winston Churchill in London) to elicit the idea of trial and triumph. This second work, under the title Into The Labyrinth, remains an enduring masterpiece of multi-screen cinema.”
A-ha! So there were multi-screen films and this sure sounds familiar: I definitely was having my first memories of life in that amazing, historic environment.
Here it is, abridged and in two parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1BT1xt6yq8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsT-wO4Nv5I
For many years, until film and video installations became as commonplace as landscape and portrait painting in galleries, I was excited by any installation that involved multiple projections, any complex dance between the already complex image track and a complex music track, and any use of split screen in films.
Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair
Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie)
Woodstock
Carrie
Nam June Paik
Chelsea Girls
Epileptic Seizure Comparison (Sharits)
Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin)
Various works by Bill Viola, Gary Hill and others
etc.
And then I had the privilege of producing two multi-image works at Bruce Mau Design, STRESS and Tokyo Countdown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GihcpCmMVBE) both of them somewhat inspired by the Expo 67 ethos, as was our project Massive Change.
Whatever I saw at Expo, and whatever I really remember, it had a huge effect on my life. I still get goosebumps thinking of those films.