Olfactory Cinema - Text 4
In 1959 there began one of the great periods in the history of olfactory cinema, a race to the winning method described by Variety at the time as a “war of rival film smellies.”[3] Two methods faced off: AromaRama, created by Charles Weiss, diffused scents by means of the movie theatre’s air conditioning system to accompany the travelogue Behind the Great Wall by Carlo Lizzani. This was a nod to the widescreen system Cinerama, which was often used for travelogues. AromaRama’s competitor, Smell-O-Vision, first created by Hans Laube in 1939 under the name “Scentovision” and then patented in the United States in 1957, diffused odours through personal diffusion systems made up of small pipes installed in each seat and releasing a total of 30 scents at the right moment to accompany the film Scent of Mystery, produced by Mike Todd Jr. This film was preceded at the initial screenings by a short animated film by John Hubley, A Tale of Old Whiff (1960), which until 2016 was believed to have been lost. Here the scents came from a central system, controlled electronically, called “Smell Brain” and in which, on a conveyor belt, were found containers of scents in the order of their appearance. These were pierced and the scents were then directed towards the pipes at the right moment on the basis of indications written on an “olfactory” track. This competition between rival techniques, one quite simple and the other complex, culminated with the victory of AromaRama; Behind the Great Wall was exhibited publicly for the first time on 2 December 1959, and would supplant Smell-O-Rama and Scent of Mystery, released on 12 January 1960. Nevertheless, each of these systems was doomed to failure, in particular because of the difficulty in getting rid of the scents in the theatre and the way the systems functioned, which audiences deemed annoying because they were noisy.[4]
