This week we publish László Moholy-Nagy’s “Simultaneous or Poly-Cinema,” a text written in 1925, in which the Bauhaus artist imagines cinema beyond the fixed rectangular screen, proposing new forms of projection for a spectator shaped by the sensory pressures of urban life. Written decades before expanded cinema and, even later, multi-screen video installation became established forms of moving-image art exhibition, Moholy-Nagy’s text now reads as an early attempt to think cinema beyond the single projection setup, as an architectural arrangement of light and movement that develops in response to altering modes of attention.1
A cinema should be built equipped for different experimental purposes in regard to apparatus and projection screen. One can, for example, visualize the normal projection plane being divided by a simple adapter into different obliquely positioned planes and cambers, like a landscape of mountains and valleys; it would be based upon the simplest possible principle of division so that the distorted effect of the projection could be controlled.
Another suggestion for changing the projection screens might be: one in the shape of a segment of a sphere instead of the present rectangular one. This projection screen should have a very large radius and therefore very little depth and should be placed at an angle of sight of about 45° for the viewer. More than one film (perhaps two in the first trials) would be played on this projection screen; and they would not, indeed, be projected on to a fixed spot but would range continually from left to right or from right to left, up and down, down and up, etc. This process will enable us to present two or more events which start independently of one another but will later by calculation combine and present parallel and coinciding episodes.
The large projection screen has the further advantage of representing a process of movement—let us say that of a motor-car—from beginning to end with greater illusion (movement in the second dimension) than the present projection screen on which one image must always be fixed.
I give a schematic drawing to make my meaning quite clear:
The film about Mr A runs from left to right: birth, course of life. The film about the lady B runs from the bottom upwards: birth, course of her life. The projection surfaces of the two films intersect: love, marriage, etc. The two films can then either proceed by intersecting in translucent sequences of events or can run parallel; or a single new film about the two people may take the place of the original two. Another film, the third or fourth, about Mr C could run simultaneously with the episodes A and B from the top downwards or from right to left or even in another direction until it can properly intersect or merge with the other films, etc.
Such a scheme will, of course, be just as suitable, if not more so, for non-objective light-projections in the manner of the photogram. If color effects are used, still richer creative possibilities will arise.
The technical solution to such projections as that of the car or the sketch described above is very simple and not at all costly. All that is needed is to fit a rotating prism in front of the lens of the film-projector.
The large projection screen enables us also to repeat a sequence of pictures simultaneously by starting again from the beginning and projecting extra prints of the running film-strip on to the screen through projectors standing next to one another. In this way the beginning of a movement can be shown over and over again as it continues—and is gradually overtaken—and novel effects are thereby achieved.
The realization of such plans makes new demands upon the capacity of our optical organ of perception, the eye, and our center of perception, the brain. The vast development both of technique and of the big cities have increased the capacity of our perceptual organs for simultaneous acoustical and optical activity. Everyday life itself affords examples of this: Berliners cross the Potsdamer Platz. They are talking, they hear simultaneously:
the horns of the motor-cars, the bells of the trams, the tooting of the omnibuses, the halloos of the coachmen, the roar of the underground railway, the shouts of the newspaper sellers, the sounds of a loudspeaker, etc.
and can keep these different acoustical impressions separate from one another. Whereas a provincial, recently found quite disorientated in this Platz, was so greatly confused by the number of impressions that he stood as though rooted to the spot before an oncoming tram. It is obviously possible to construct an analogous situation with optical experiences.
Analogous, too: that modern optics and acoustics, employed as means of artistic creation, can be accepted by and can enrich only those who are receptive to the times in which they live.
1925
The text was first printed in Malerei, Photographie, Film (Albert Langen, Munich, 1925), later revised in Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Albert Langen Verlag, Munich, 1927), and published in English in Janet Seligman’s translation, Painting, Photography, Film (Lund Humphries, London, 1969, and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1973).
