Notebook is covering the Locarno Film Festival with a cycle of close reads written by the participants in the Critics Academy.
The Circarama Circular Theater of the SBB at Expo 64 in Lausanne, a previous panoramic effort by Ernest Albrecht Heiniger. Photograph courtesy of Fotostiftung Schweiz.
The decommissioned projection booth for the Locarno Film Festival’s Piazza Grande screenings has taken on a new life. It now services a very different cinematic encounter: the festival's “Virtual Reality Experience,” copresented by Locarno and the Geneva International Film Festival. One of the two projects on view is Impressions of Switzerland, a twenty-minute, dialogue-free documentary by Swiss avant-garde artist Ernest Albrecht Heiniger. Without additional context, viewers might expect a spotlight on present-day Switzerland; the staff member assisting me with the Oculus VR headset curtly described the film as “just cows and stuff.”
I found myself virtually suspended in a panoptic space, surrounded by a 360-degree strip of screen. The film is also fashioned as a loop, beginning and ending with a bucolic drive down a country road in autumn. This is followed by typical, timeless images of Swiss tourism: The camera captures striking locales from high above, flying over snowy mountains, idyllic green valleys, and quaint hillside villages, all set to a dynamic orchestral score. The landscapes physically encircled me, enticing me to explore every angle of each scene by swiveling my chair. At one moment, a look behind me revealed an additional pair of mountain climbers emerging onto the rock face; in another, I naturally turned to follow the route of a group of skiers slaloming downhill. The film’s midsection consists of backdrops that embody clichés of Western socioeconomic progress: a chemistry lab, an oil rig, a factory floor, and a busy stock exchange. In the last setting, the camera is placed at an in-scene observer’s eye level, right in the middle of a group of men, so uniform in their appearance—many bespectacled with thick frames and all wearing crisply ironed white-collared shirts—gesticulating at each other across the trading floor.
As more and more people are introduced, I began to realize, by the early-’80s fashion and cars, that the film depicts Swiss communities as they were four decades ago. Heiniger made Impressions of Switzerland in 1984 with Swissorama, his own 360-degree recording and theatrical system intended to improve upon the Circarama system patented by Walt Disney, for whom Heiniger made short films during the 1950s. Though the film is ironically dated by moments that signal Switzerland’s entry into a new era, some community traditions and cultural setpieces cut more easily through time. Images of horse-drawn chariot races, outdoor wrestling matches, Carnival celebrations with Tschäggättä masks, and steamboat trips on Lake Lucerne resonate as place-specific sensorial memories.
As I watched these festive scenes play out, I was surprised to notice some of the people stare into Heiniger’s camera with a puzzled expression, then quickly turn away. At two separate instances, passing cows pause and turn, too; they gaze into the lens, then shuffle past and proceed on their merry way. A wave of cognitive dissonance washed over me at the sight of 40-year-old expressions of technological bewilderment associated now with our own age of extended reality.
Panoramic stills from Impressions of Switzerland (Ernest Albrecht Heiniger, 1984).
As a cameraman and director, Heniger documented everyday scenes from around the world and commercially packaged them for inquisitive American audiences, emulating the experience of tourism without the difficulty of travel. In the custom-built Swissorama, viewers could sit or lean on metal bars akin to subway perch benches and take in his immersive documentary as a communal experience towering above and around them, projected on a screen over five meters high and 60 meters in circumference. The Swiss Film Archive restored Heniger’s film “in virtual reality,” simulating also the seating space of the original Swissorama. The VR viewer is stuck in the center of the virtual room, however, and the recreated screens never fully capture the sheer scale and envelopment of the physical space, where one’s peripheral vision, too, would have been filled with the scenes. During my second viewing, I yearned for the freedom of movement afforded by Heiniger’s installation, rather than the hastily assembled, Plato’s-cave headset and headphones on offer.
At Locarno, viewers of the restored Impressions of Switzerland are twice distanced from d’Schwiiz of the 1980s, first by the filmmaker’s nine-camera recording apparatus, and then by the way the Swiss Film Archive reworked the piece for the enclosed VR environment. Heiniger’s curious contraption instilled awe and fascination with a larger-than-life projection, presented in a shared space. Today, the global phenomenon of immersive Van Gogh exhibitions claims to offer the same, though it quickly reveals itself to be reductive, optimized not for a collective journey but for capture and dissemination on a tiny handheld screen. The Swiss Film Archive’s rendering of Heniger’s film likewise reframes immersion as a solitary venture premised upon blocking out the outside world.
What the artist might have thought of this “restoration” is left as an exercise for the imagination. Heiniger died in 1993, and his Swissorama, too, is gone. It declined in popularity until it was dismantled in 2002 and was replaced by another immersive technology, the IMAX theater. The transformation of Impressions of Switzerland reveals to us the double-edged sword of VR: It’s able to simulate aspects of reality to a strikingly high degree, yet it always risks losing the viewer by isolating them in that reality, or else by inducing motion sickness. Putting on the headset means surrendering yourself to this magical machine that can immerse you in, and thereby transport you to, the most wondrous of places, but it’s up to you to decide when to stay in and when to get out.
Keep reading our coverage of Locarno 2025.