The Whole World on a Screen

As the Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten began to play last week in class, I had the sudden realisation that it was not the first time that I had seen the short film. As a child (probably about nine or ten), I had seen the film playing at a science museum (perhaps Questacon?), and I recall even then being struck by this film. For me, it unites a fascinating paradox – that it is our insignificance which makes us significant. The mis-en-scène of this curious film made me feel that by placing the man at the centre of the screen, the entire universe was being explored in relation to him, rather than in spite of him. It reminded me vividly of the opening scene of the Robert Zemeckis film Contact, and it is this opening sequence that I’d like to comment on, in light of the aesthetic of Powers of Ten.

For those of you who may have missed the short film, Powers of Ten is about the relative size of things in relation to the entire known universe (no small feat!). It begins with a man lying on a picnic blanket, and the camera begins to gradually pull back from his location, every ten seconds adding a zero to the distance in metres from the man as more and more of the world (and his place in it) is revealed. Despite the educational overtones of the film, the experience is trance-like. After we have panned back to what seems like the edge of the known universe, the film is ‘reversed’ at a faster speed, and once we come to the man at the picnic, we continue to zoom in on his hand, until we reach the infinitesimal level of the inside of an atom. The film uses minimal music, and at the left-hand of the screen is a marker that keeps track of the distance from earth, the ‘powers of ten’.

What strikes me about Powers of Ten is its decision to not only pull back from the universe, but to return to it at such speed and continue in the examination of the man’s hand. It is this examination which I think provoked my dual response to the film. The insignificance that we feel from the first half of the film is overturned by the second half. We zoom further and further into the man’s hand, (excuse my scientific ignorance as to what is being shown on screen – atoms, neutrons etc mean very little to me) as the particles inside the man’s hand reveal more and more layers and depth. The imagery bears a remarkable resemblance to the first half of the film, and the vastness of the universe is mirrored in the vastness of our very genetic makeup. I was forcibly reminded of a line from Amélie, where a man blinks in astonishment and disbelief as he reads a newspaper and the narration explains, “Meanwhile, on a bench in Villette Square, Félix Lerbier learns there are more links in his brain than atoms in the universe.” It is so difficult to quantify these concepts, and Powers of Ten manages to do so beautifully.

In a similar fashion, the opening of Contact moves through the universe and the galaxy through the first three minutes of the film, before coming to rest on an extreme close-up of a girl’s eye. This girl is Ellie, who we learn is obsessed with what lies ‘out there’ in the universe.

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLQF-4uyD4Y

In the opening of Contact, we slowly move away from the earth, into the galaxy and the solar system. The soundtrack alternates between silence, and snippets from broadcasts from history. The anachronistic sections of audio that we hear emphasise the viewer’s distance from the earth, as the tracking shot is juxtaposed with radio emissions that were produced some years or decades ago. Close to earth, modern-day sound clips are hears, whereas the further we drift out, the clips become less recent, including Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963). Finally, the images coalesce into the single close-up of a young girl’s eye. For me, this is the most striking similarity to Powers of Ten, not in its imagery, but its signification. The world in Contact is vast and unknowable, but culminates in this girl’s eye. It suggests that the world may not be that unknowable or distant, but in fact a part of us. In terms of its filmic meaning, this has become quite a normalised signifier – indeed, consider the opening of Chicago where Roxie’s eye become the centre of the title.

While in Contact, the character of Ellie has the entire universe in her eyes, the shot from Chicago becomes not the whole world, but a very small part of it – Chicago. The opening of Contact emphasises Ellie’s passion for the vast unknown, and her search for extra-terrestrial communication, while in Chicago, the concept conveyed is that the world of jazz in Chicago is indeed Roxie’s whole world.

These shots seem to beg the question (or attempt to answer it) as to whether we are inherently significant or insignificant in the universe. In Powers of Ten, the man’s whole world is expanded out, and obviously the point of focus is not eyes, but the man’s hands. In some ways, this makes its point even more pertinent, as it’s not the soul of the character that the film is trying to explore, nor a filmic way of furthering characterisation. Instead, Powers of Ten tells us more about us, the viewers of the film, than the subject of the man. The man is not individualised – he could be myself, or any other person, and it therefore asks us questions not about a character’s outlook on life, but our own.