Half Roman orgy, half sacred rite

Is this the shape of cinema to come? Howard Feinstein (below) reports from New York on the first ever attempt to make an Imax feature film, while Sheila Johnston (left) visits Cits-Cins 2 in Paris, an exhibition that celebrates the `future perfect' of cinema

Cinema celebrated its 100th birthday last month (most accounts set the date in March 1895, when the Lumire Brothers first projected their one-reelers to the public), but Britain's celebrations won't begin in earnest until next year. Even then, they look as though they might go off at half cock. Our plans to mount a big, attention-grabbing exhibition were thwarted by the lack of funds and a suitable space. And as usual (the regularity with which this happens is becoming depressing), it's left to France to show us what might have been.

The title of Cits-Cins 2 sets us up to expect a sequel to CC1, an exhibition eight years ago devoted to the city in the movies. Though designed by the same innovative team, this is entirely different. Notionally, it's part of Paris's ambitious year-long programme of events feting film's centenary. In practice, it's a bold and eccentric series of installations with a strong sci-fi flavour.

The show's conceit is that it's the attempt of an archaeologist, working in the year 3000, to reconstruct what life must have been like in the 20th century employing only movies as his source material: instead of a dutiful plod through the last 100 years of cinema, we have a hallucinatory vision of things to come - or, as the rather pretentious programme notes put it, "the history of cinema conjugated, not in the past tense but in the future perfect".

Housed in the properly space-age setting of La Dfense, the exhibition begins in a room covered with white gravel and dominated by a monolith intended to evoke 2001: a Space Odyssey. Through the swirling mists, embedded in the glaciers around the monolith, we notice flickering television monitors.

Then a disembodied hologrammed head appears on the wall behind us explaining that he is the archaeologist and we are on the site of his dig. Fragments of images, stored in round tin boxes, are all that remains of the 20th century. We are invited through a celluloid curtain to share his reconstruction of a lost civilisation. As our helpful programme notes remark, "the spectator travels through time, immersing himself in a futuristic urban symphony, an astonishing mixture of visual and aural sensations".

The exhibition proper is staged in a weird, slightly decrepit street reminiscent of Blade Runner (unsurprisingly, clips from Ridley Scott's film figure in several installations). It includes the "Radiant City", a block of council flats with interior dcor (phosphorescent fish; a bird- cage containing a cat) worthy of Magritte. There is a drive-in cinema filled with ramshackle, gold-sprayed motorbikes and cars: its programme (clips from Brazil, Mad Max and Superman) is dedicated to the cinema's abiding fascination with bizarre modes of transport.

In "Cin-culte", you can genuflect before Garbo, Dietrich and Arletty while hidden microphones magnify your steps and voice to create the impression of being in a vast, echoing cathedral; the clips celebrate Mata Hari, Gilda and King Kong. "Fantasmania" gives us the profane side of the cinema experience: erotic moments from City of Women, Sherlock Jr and When Harry Met Sally (guess which clip?) unspool beneath an opulent, rose-shaped canopy, while the viewer reclines on an undulating red rubber bed.

There is a bar where you can drink beer while watching beautifully tinted prints of rare early films, the "House of the Madman Savant" which shows clips from Frankenstein and Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts, and a place called "Boum" which is devoted to the unique pleasures of the film explosion.

The climax, and perhaps most successful installation of all, is the last, "Rves" ("Dreams"). Before entering, we are solemnly advised that this is a rite of passage, a point of no return; afterwards, re-entry to the show is forbidden. We slip on a white surplice or toga, arrive in a white room dominated by an enormous screen and, reclining on plump white cushions, watch some of the strangest and most visionary scenes the cinema has produced, from The Wizard of Oz, 81/2, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Meanwhile, an overhead projector beams images on to the floor: surrounded by fellow-visitors transformed into nebulous ghosts, the viewer himself becomes a cinema screen. It feels like half sacred rite, half Roman orgy.

Since most of Cits-Cins's sponsors seem to be manufacturers of alcoholic beverages, the French government health warning - consommer avec moderation - is sprinkled liberally through the show's promotional literature. It could scarcely be less appropriate for this more delirious and excessive of events. Like all things of its nature, this show is either brilliant or complete piffle. But, in either case, it's fun (it helps to speak French, but that's by no means essential). As the travel guides say, vaut un dtour.

n Cits-Cins 2 continues at La Dfense, Paris until 31 December