Soviet Circorama

The USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements, 1959 Part I

The first in a new series looking at the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Moscow from the Soviet Press, 1959.

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IT IS an unusual cinema hall surrounded by a high circular screen. There are no seats and the spectators walk about as they please.

When the lights go out and the picture begins, its first shots take the spectator to offshore oil fields. Wherever you look there is the sea with the sound of its splashing waves audible. Then the scene changes and you see a high-speed plane racing above the plains of Central Russia, across Siberia, and over the mountains of the Caucasus. The impression is that you are up in the plane and you completely forget that you are only watching a film. When the film is over you leave feeling that you have made an exciting trip.

This Circorama cinema theater accommodating three hundred spectators has been erected on the territory of the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements. It is a round structure of glass. steel and plastic.

The building was put up in slightly more than three months with the most modern apparatus for it sent from factories in Moscow. Leningrad, Kiev, Samarkand, Odessa and Shostka. The 22 huge projectors were hoisted by cranes and gently deposited in the circular projecting room.

The complete set of apparatus for the circorama was designed under the technical guidance of the USSR Cinephoto Research Institute. Vladimir Kolar, the engineer in charge, showed the first spectators the control panel which simultaneously sets in motion all the projectors.

"Here is the heart of our circorama," he said. "Apart from the projectors the panel controls the stereophonic sound track apparatus and many other machines. As distinguished from the American circorama system with only one band of screens, our system has two - one under the other below the cupola of the auditorium. Another difference is that while in the American circorama you hear only the music and the announcer's words, in our systerm the sound is synchronized with the action, accompanies it, illustrating all that is shown on the screen."

Vladimir Kotov explains why there is such an amazingly "live" sound. He points to the floor pits and the apertures in the ceiling and behind the screen from where the smooth velvety sounds flow, reproduced by thirty-six loud-speakers. To make the 400-square-meter gleaming white screen encircling the auditorium transmit sound it is perforated with minute holes.

The first Soviet circorama film was the twenty-minute-long The March of Spring, produced jointly by the Central Documentary Film Studios and the Animated Cartoon Film Studios. It was directed by Vasili Katanyan and Leonid Makhnach and the cameramen were Igor Bessarabov and Andrei Semin.