For many of us, the planetarium conjures up images of high school science excursions – if it conjures up anything at all. Yet planetariums are also home to some of the most radical cinema being produced today.
As part of this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, Melbourne's planetarium, at Scienceworks in Spotswood, played host to the Fulldome Showcase, a program of short films specifically designed to be screened in planetariums.
These films are mostly abstract, and explore such themes as consciousness, spatial acoustics and the workings of the human mind. We are a long way from grade five science, and a long way from the rest of MIFF.
“It’s a transcendental form of cinema,” says Museum Victoria’s Warik Lawrence. “It’s much more visceral than your standard film.”
This he attributes to the design of a Planetarium’s auditorium and screen: audience members recline in their seats, watching not a screen in front of them but one above them, curved inside the Planetarium’s distinctive roof.
“Because you’re not positioned the way you regularly are when viewing a film, it changes your whole perception within your body,” he says. “You’re looking up at a screen that completely immerses you. You lose sense of where it is. It’s transcendental.”
One of the more compelling works screened this year is the awkwardly titled Cymasonics Matrix Optimiser 2.0. The MIFF program describes the film as “different forms of spatial floating harmonographics, physical and astronomical simulations, as well as real-time wave field visualisations – very near to classical cymatics”.
If all that sounds a bit out there and confusing, well watching it kind of is. The experience of Optimiser 2.0 is somewhat akin to watching a vivid dream float above and around you, synced to music. Lines and colours move through time and space, reverberating in time with musical rhythms. It’s a trippy experience.
“It completely throws off your body when you’re watching that show,” Lawrence says. “It was put together by a sound designer. He’s exploring the physical space of the screen, and [the space] within yourself as a viewer.”
Another film in the program, Sentient, is an abstract exploration of perception and the human mind. What is behind this obsession with science, technology and consciousness?
Lawrence suspects it’s a holdover from the attachment of planetariums to science museums. In fact, he estimates that 80 to 90 per cent of the films created for fulldomes today are still astronomy-based works.
But artists are slowly taking an interest in the medium, and creating fascinating hybrid works. Because the fulldome is such an under-used environment in which to screen moving images, all bets seem to be off.
Lawrence nominates as a favourite 2010’s Cosmic Dance, a film that mixes astrophysics, Hinduism and Bollywood dancing.
He also notes that "from time to time we also do live performances in the dome". One of these was staged last year, when Natural Satellite featured renowned classical guitarists the Grigoryian Brothers performing a piece of music inspired by the moons of the solar system. Earlier this year, the Planetarium presented Elemental in tandem with The Wheeler Centre, a show that mixed moving images, poetry and puppetry.
“You go to the Hamburg Planetarium and they’ve got VJs and DJs performing in the dome,” Lawrence says. “It’s open 10am to 11pm every day of the week. It’s an all-encompassing experience.”
But fulldomes are just one of the many creative screening spaces where moving images are being projected these days. The Vertical Cinema movement installs tall, narrow screens inside church spires. A popular Game of Thrones experience currently touring the world makes use of the Occulus Rift headset to lead audience members on a virtual reality tour of The Wall, the show's striking icy barricade in the frozen north of Westeros.
Could MIFF offer such experiences in the future? Artistic director Michelle Carey is adamant the festival should be experimenting with these sorts of experiences. "It’s about seeing different films in different contexts," she says. "We have an all-encompassing attitude to film going."
MIFF programmer Al Cossar agrees. "The Fulldome Showcase offers people the chance to engage with a different kind of cinema,” he says, adding that audiences are responding well, with all Fulldome showcases selling out last year. "The Fulldome works are a unique element in the context of the program."
