ON THROUGH THE COSMOS
Immersive 360-degree experience
Seeking escape from orange cones and construction chaos and granite stumps atop the mountain and an urban rodeo in Old Montreal? Seeking to be far from the madding crowds of festival season in the city? Seeking serenity — now?
It’s within our grasp at the Space for Life’s Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium, and from there it’s a journey through the cosmos, an immersive audio/visual experience projected in eye-popping 360-degree, full-dome format. It’s smooth sailing all the way through — no traffic gridlock, no detours, no road rage.
Kyma, Power of Waves, the first-ever partnership between the Space for Life’s Planetarium and the National Film Board of Canada, is a trip like no other — and without the need for mindaltering meds. And it’s so much more cost effective than the $40-million Jacques Cartier Bridge light show created to celebrate the city’s 375th birthday.
The documentary, made for a relative pittance at just under $800,000, carries viewers off on an excursion examining the science of invisible waves, large and small, in our universe that is nearly 14 billion years old. Talk about history.
To better convey the adventure, Montreal director Philippe Baylaucq avoids narration and employs instead acrobats and musicians performing a mystical score by Robert Marcel Lepage on screen to complement this space odyssey. Truly visionary stuff, and all homemade to boot.
“Serenity now was our objective,” notes director Baylaucq, referring to that classic mantra from the Seinfeld sitcom of yore.
This is Baylaucq’s third film foray at the Planetarium. He directed Tempo and co-directed Aurorae.
“Clearly, it is an astronomical subject to undertake. My take on that in the past and now, under the dome, is perspective; something that enables us to stand back. I wanted to take that further, somewhere in the solar system or beyond, which is always fascinating.
“But my sense in the shows that I’ve seen (at the Planetarium) is — although these shows are totally mesmerizing — after five or 10 minutes, that you begin to feel homesick for Earth. In other words, we need to connect with things that we can identify with. So my goal here was to provide perspective on things we’ve never seen before but also to give a sense of how it is connected to me as a living being.” Mission accomplished.
The subject of invisible waves gave Baylaucq the opportunity to create on a different level, to create a circular story in lieu of a linear one and to fall back on his training as a sculptor. He had studied both sculpture and film at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London.
“It doesn’t matter where you situate yourself in history. True artists and true creators are on par with anything that’s being done now, because they made the best with the means that they had. What (late NFB director) Colin Low and a whole coterie of extraordinary creators in the ’60s did with (film at) Expo 67 was to really lay down the groundwork for what’s being done today.
“Being given carte blanche from the NFB to do their first documentary in a 360-degree format, I felt that I really had to do my best and to honour what had been done by my predecessors,” says Baylaucq, who says he was influenced by the “life-changing” Powers of Ten — an American documentary depicting the relative scale of the universe — which he saw when he was 10.
Baylaucq was also inspired by 19th-century German physicist and musician Ernst Chladni, considered to be the father of both modern acoustics and the study of meteorites.
“He was quite the rock star in his day, going from royal court to royal court. He would demonstrate various methods of vibration by running a violin bow across a glass tray filled with grains of sand. Those sands would later configure into geometric forms. This was considered magic then. And it made wavelengths visible. So if Chladni did it and others have done it since, I thought why couldn’t I take these figures and use them to essentially tell my story through the prism of how we imagine waves.”
As highbrow as Baylaucq’s inspirations may be, viewers can rest assured that what emerges on screen is without pretence, a totally accessible and transfixing experience that transports us to another dimension without having to dwell on the science that gets us there.
Baylaucq, who spent a year putting the pieces of Kyma together, credits his young collaborators for helping to make this a film that should captivate audiences ages “four to 94.”
“There’s no commentary that kids or anyone else will have to latch on to. It’s just visuals and music. It’s all about the wonder of intuition,” he explains.
“When I started this project, I asked myself how it was that the ancient Greeks could imagine an atom without being able to see one. It was about intuition then, and it’s still about the magic of intuition now.”