Product Details

• Format: Color, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Pyramid Films Corpor
• VHS Release Date: January 1, 1978
• Run Time: 21 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302179815
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #241,124 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Landmark Film, December 19, 1999

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Films of Charles and Ray EAMES - Volume 1: Powers of Ten [VHS] (VHS Tape)

From the cover:

Charles and Ray Eames are among the finest American designers of this century. They are best known for their ground-breaking contributions to architecture, furniture design (the Eames Chair), industrial design and manufacturing, and the photographic arts.

The legacy of this husband and wife team includes more than 75 films that reflect the breadth and depth of their interests and the integrity of their vision. Volume 1 is a part of a video collection of these classic films.

"Powers of Ten" takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out, until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others.

Returning to earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward - into the hand of the sleeping picnicker - with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.

This cassette also includes the original version of "Powers of Ten," produced in 1968, entitled "A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing With the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe," a remarkable film in its own right.

Introduction narrated by Gregory Peck.

21 minutes.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the greatest films ever made, September 27, 2001

By 

absent_minded_prof (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Films of Charles and Ray EAMES - Volume 1: Powers of Ten [VHS] (VHS Tape)

It is impossible to overstate how amazing this little movie is. I still remember seeing it for the first time, at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., at the age of nine, wearing my Boston Red Sox baseball cap. I think I literally had to be dragged away, I just wanted to see it again and again.

This video contains both the final version of the film, which I saw as a child, and the original, discarded film from which the final version was derived. In the final version, the "camera" begins by focusing on a couple lying out on a picnic blanket, in a small park in Chicago. Every ten seconds, the camera pulls back by a factor of ten, AKA a single "order of magnitude," for all you non-scientists out there. Gradually you come to see the entire park, then the city of Chicago, then the entire metropolitan region, the Great Lakes, North America, Earth... At the end of four minutes, the "camera" has pulled back by ten to the twenty-fourth meters, which is far enough back to be far outside of our Milky Way galaxy, and even outside our local supercluster, the Virgo supercluster. One almost wishes that Ray and Charles Eames had attempted this marvel of a film after the 1980s, when, due to advances in our astronomical understanding of the universe, they could have included an extra 30 or 40 seconds of pulling back the camera, to include large-scale structure, the "Great Attractor," etc. Anyway, after the four minutes of pulling the camera back, they zip it back in at the couple on the blanket at five times the original speed, in 48 seconds flat. (For more fun than humans should be allowed, you might want to use your remote control to fast-forward this part. What a ride!!!) Anyway, the camera zips in to focus on the hand of the man lying on the picnic blanket, and then goes INWARD, into the cells on his hand, within his DNA, inside a carbon atom, and into the very nucleus of the carbon atom. The range of scales covered is ten to the fortieth power, which seeing this movie will help you understand in a profoundly visceral way. No mean feat, eh?!!?

After this treat of a film, we see the earlier version upon which it was based. The primary difference between the two versions is that in the first version, there is a side window kept running throughout the movie, which shows the effect of relativity on the time-keeping of ten seconds per order of magnitude of meters travelled. Around the time the "camera" pulls back from 10-to-the-13th to 10-to-the-14th meters, the subjective time-sense of the camera operator would start to be strongly affected by relativity, because the "camera" would start to be travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Gradually, subjective and Earthly time-sense gets so far out of whack that ten seconds for the cameraman would be 100,000,000 years on Earth. This might have the effect of prompting the philosophically-inclined viewer to get the screaming meemies, but it's better not to sweat the phiosophical details too much. Just ride with it, baby. Anyway, evidently, the producers decided that the additional feature of the relativistic clock was too distracting, and they pulled it from the final version. Here in this video, we get to see both versions of the film, which is a pretty tremendous experience.

If you are a science or math teacher, or if you know one with a birthday coming up, for crying out loud BUY THIS MOVIE!!! It's so fantastic, it will make kids wonder why on Earth any rational human would ever voluntarily do anything other than study science and math. Ten-to-the-fortieth thumbs up!

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In a League By Themselves., October 5, 1999

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Films of Charles and Ray EAMES - Volume 1: Powers of Ten [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Charles and Ray Eames utilized film in a way that emphasized the unique characteristics of the medium. It is difficult, if not impossible, to convey any sense of the very large (the Universe) or the very small (the proton) in any other medium, but using the special properties of film in "Powers of Ten," the Eameses were able to do exactly that. This film succeeds in achieving one of the major goals of all art and comminications -- making the viewer see the world differently.

Buy it. You will not be disappointed.