Powers of Ten

I was reflecting on Jess Franco’s zooms earlier and I remembered this famous science short from 1977… Powers of Ten, a fantastic 9min film which takes the viewer on a cosmic zoom into outer and inner space. The film begins with an overhead shot of a couple picnicking on the Chicago lakeside and proceeds to zoom out at a rate of one power of ten per 10 seconds, all the way to the deepest recesses of empty space. At that point the film reverses its track, back to the picnicking couple and continues its journey into the hand of the man, passed the microscopic foundations of the human body, ending on quarks in a proton of a carbon atom and “the edge of present understanding”. Accompanying the viewer on this mind-bending trip is the warm friendly voice-over of physics professor Philip Morrison as well as a great electronic score by Elmer Bernstein that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Gothic Horror film…