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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.