Expo 67: Expanded CInema engages in fundamental research and contextualization of 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 (Youngblood). Our research is shaped by four lines of inquiry:
* What were these films? What influenced their design, presentation and reception? How were they the product of their historical era? In what way could they be seen as part of a continuum in Canadian art and thought?
* What place do these films have in Canadian documentary and experimental cinema?
* Where do these films fit in the history and understanding of new communication technologies?
* In what sense did the Expo films reflect the development of Canadian cultural citizenship and Canada’s imagining of itself as a nation in an international context?
In a broader context, this project addresses the role of Expo 67 as utopian vision, a topic that has already proven to be of interest in the fields of architecture, design, and urban studies. Our research will incorporate the work of these fields and will, as well, provide resources for the digital recreation of the films and the spaces in which they were shown. In doing so it will contribute to the archaeology of media technologies and specify Canada’s contribution to conceptualizing the ‘new’ in digital media.
* What were these films? What influenced their design, presentation and reception? How were they the product of their historical era? In what way could they be seen as part of a continuum in Canadian art and thought?
* What place do these films have in Canadian documentary and experimental cinema?
* Where do these films fit in the history and understanding of new communication technologies?
* In what sense did the Expo films reflect the development of Canadian cultural citizenship and Canada’s imagining of itself as a nation in an international context?
In a broader context, this project addresses the role of Expo 67 as utopian vision, a topic that has already proven to be of interest in the fields of architecture, design, and urban studies. Our research will incorporate the work of these fields and will, as well, provide resources for the digital recreation of the films and the spaces in which they were shown. In doing so it will contribute to the archaeology of media technologies and specify Canada’s contribution to conceptualizing the ‘new’ in digital media.