Cinema: Magic in Montreal: The Films of Expo

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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.