Definition and the Earliest Immersive Systems - Text 1
Plunging viewers into a darkened room where they look up at a luminous screen may already seem like an effort to immerse them in the content projected. The attractions of early cinema can also be seen as having an immersive quality, just like the initial experiments with sound and colour. One might contend, then, that cinema has always been inclined to sensorial immersion, which would thus be consubstantial with it. The technical systems in question here are distinguished by having combined various technologies in order to increase viewers’ sensorial immersion and “put them in the picture” (to take up one of the slogans of Cinerama films), for the most part by means of widescreen films (with a higher aspect ratio in projection than the standard ratios obtained with classical 35 mm film stock) and multi-channel sound systems.[1]
Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that some forms of technology which were innovative in their day can become standard. In this way many have been assimilated by the film industry and, over time, become commonplace and not particularly spectacular. This is the case, for example, of CinemaScope. The American company Twentieth Century-Fox purchased the patent for this system in 1952, mostly to present blockbuster films in a wider format. Today the projection formats devolved from CinemaScope are conventional. Conversely, other processes, little compatible with narrative cinema and its need for mental immersion, have been rejected by cinema because having too many sensorial demands on viewers appears to “remove” them from the film’s content.[2] This was the case for example with hemispheric, circular, motion simulator and/or olfactory cinema, which will not be discussed here.[3]
Most of these immersive systems were developed in the United States in the 1950s, but one of the earliest and most representative was presented in France in 1927. This was the “triple screen” patented for the film Napoléon by the film’s director himself, Abel Gance. Gance was an innovative filmmaker who on several occasions sought to reinvent film language by taking advantage of technical possibilities. The “triple-screen” system, baptized “Polyvision” by the critic Émile Vuillermoz, made it possible to project three images side by side and thereby to offer an image three times as wide as the usual image (three times the conventional 1.33:1 ratio of the day, or a projection ratio of four to one).[4] Gance could thus show scenes with three different images joined together, or with a single image in a panoramic format,[5] as shown below. In the latter case, the image was made up of three previously-filmed images using three cameras placed side by side. In 1935, Gance developed an immersive sound system to accompany his Polyvision, which he called Perspective sonore[6] and had invented with André Debrie.
