Cinema: 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...