Auckland Architecture Week Film Festival, in association with Jasmax

Academy Cinema: 44 Lorne St, Auckland

www.academycinemas.co.nz
www.jasmax.com

Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames, rereleased in 1977. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten. The film is an adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, and more recently is the basis of a new book version. Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work.

The film begins with a view of a man and woman picnicking in a park, which settles on an one-meter-square overhead image of the man reclining on a blanket. The viewpoint, accompanied by a voiceover by Philip Morrison, then slowly zooms out to a view ten meters across.  The zoom-out continues (at a rate of one power of ten per 10 seconds), to a view of 100 meters (10² m), then 1 kilometer (10³ m), and so on, increasing the perspective—the picnic is revealed to be taking place in Burnham Park, on Chicago's lakefront—and continuing to zoom out to a field of view of 10²⁴ meters, or the size of the observable universe.  The camera then zooms back in at a rate of a power of ten per 2 seconds to the picnic, and then slows back down to its original rate into the man's hand, to views of negative powers of ten—10⁻¹ m, and so forth—until the camera comes to quarks in a proton of a carbon atom at 10⁻¹⁶ meter.