Filmic Experience : La Géode

La Géode is an omnimax cinema theatre located in the Parc de la Villette , at the Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Paris. Opened its doors to viewers in 1985 not only as the only spherical building in Paris, but also as a cinema theatre that offered a quite different filmic experience to its viewers compared with traditional cinemas.

In La Géode, Imax formatted films are projected on a half spherical dome constituting approximately 1000 square meters. The building has a diameter of 36 meters and it weights more than 6000 tons. The trompe l’oeil architecture reflects its surroundings. It also has a unique sound system that is powered with 21000 watts through 12 channels. Due to 30.000 lumens of projection power, it would be possible to see the light coming out of Géode from the moon if its top structure is removed.

The hemispherical projection and the use of more channels in sound added up to a different sitting position and viewing angle could surely be defined as a new experience of cinema. Although, it is debatable that Géode changes our worlds dramatically, this is, on the other hand a rare chance to consider contemporary architecture’s role on filmic experience.

Géeode’s screen has a spherical shape that stands on top of the viewer. Therefore we can talk about a more democratic, equal distribution of seats: sitting nearer to the screen is out of the question since every viewer is somehow at a similar distance to the spherical screen. In traditional theatres, in order to let everyone see the screen properly, the old amphitheater model is usually applied and each row of seats is raised towards the back of the halls gradually; although this architecture is functional, the presence of the other viewers is visible. Géode, by rotating the sitting position of the viewer towards a dome, upwards, abrogates the presence of the other viewers when watching a film. It is possible to argue that this contributes positively to the inclusion of viewer into film atmosphere. By removing the presence of the other viewers from the frame, we can expect viewers to feel more private, alone and consequently, open to the atmosphere created by the film.

In a world where filmic experience is very personalized, La Géode offers a new perspective to the issue. The growing numbers of TV screens in houses and home-theatre systems is one of the most important reasons why we can talk about a change in filmic experience, but La Géode invites viewers both to an old experience, that is, going to a cinema theatre, and to a new experience at the same time.

Football with Bashir

An interesting thing about collective memory is that there are times when individuals forget or remember things at the same moment. An event that actually happened can be forgotten or it can even be erased from one's past. Concrete becomes a dream when history can be re-written. It is possible to re-write history as long as people want to believe.

Football is a very good example for this discussion. Most individuals do not remember how and when they learned the rules of football: Were they small children thought by a father or had they a sports teacher in their school educating them? It is quite difficult for people to get an answer for these types of questions; questions about our past that have traces of certain events but not an actual data. Time goes by, and as people change, their emotions about their past change. This affects their ability to write about past dramatically. History is full of facts that contradict with each other but the important detail here is that there is a collective memory that that appears in people’s minds although there is no indication that this memory relates to truth.

Waltz with Bashir is quite successful in questioning the effects of trauma on both human psychology and memory. An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict. Director Ari cannot remember a certain period of time in his past and at the end of the interviews he conducts, he finally finds out that he actually took part in the massacre of Palestinian people. Although 99 percent of it is a rotoscope animation, film relies heavily on historical facts about the invasion; at the end, we are left alone with documented results of Sabra and Shatila from a news archive.

Although it is quite a crucial discussion area, history and the re-writing of it in individuals’ minds leaves us no other choice than to be skeptical towards facts. Power circles that aim recreating history and trauma that opens minds for such manipulations are few details that need to be unforgettable.