Kinoautomat (1967): The First Interactive Film

The film-within-the-system is a short black comedy. Petr Novák, an ordinary tenant of a Prague housing block, opens the door to his neighbour — and the screening begins with a flash-forward: his apartment is on fire, and Mr. Novák believes he is responsible. Everything that follows is a series of flashbacks explaining how he got there — and at every fork the hall decides his next move.

The casting was part of the design: Miroslav Horníček played both Mr. Novák on screen and the moderator on stage. At the Montreal premiere he delivered his English links phonetically: the moderator’s patter (“You have made an excellent choice”) was as scripted as the film itself.

Every one of the 127 seats had a console with green and red buttons. The film froze at a stop frame; the moderator presented the two candidate scenes; the hall voted; the tally lit up along the screen edge, seat by seat; and the projectionist switched a lens cap between two synchronised projectors, each threaded with a different cut. The chosen scene played, and the film ran on to the next stop. The title was literal: a vending machine for plot turns, run entirely by live theatre — a moderator, a hall, a projectionist.

The pavilion’s scenography came from Josef Svoboda of Laterna Magika, Czechoslovakia’s experimental multimedia theatre: Kinoautomat was that tradition projected into cinema — not new camera technology, but an architecture of participation around a conventional print.

The part most often forgotten: the votes barely changed the story. The script was written so that both scenes offered at every fork returned to the same next chapter — only ever 19 distinct scenes existed. Whatever the hall decided, the ending stayed the same: the fire. The satire was aimed squarely at democracy itself — a majority rules, and nothing changes — and Činčera made no secret of it: the fire was the message.

In the typology I use across this site, Kinoautomat is nodal branching with hard convergence: forks spend drama, but the spine stays single. The immersion-versus-agency debate Kinoautomat staged in 1967 still runs through interactive-cinema theory — I map it in “Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Interactive Cinema”, and the history chapter is in my master’s thesis.

In Montreal the pavilion became a sensation — the American press called it the guaranteed hit of the exposition, and Hollywood came asking. The answer was short: the concept belonged to the state, and under the Communist government there was nothing to sign. The system toured — HemisFair in 1968, Expo ’74 in Spokane — and in 1971–72 Kinoautomat finally ran at home, at Prague’s Světozor, to full houses.

Then it disappeared: in 1972 the ruling party banned the film. Činčera belonged to the “politically unconfident” authors, as his daughter Alena Činčerová recalled. In the 1990s Czech television briefly broadcast the film with the two reels split across two channels, ČT1 and ČT2 — switching channels at every fork assembled a different version. Činčera’s verdict: “They felt cheated. I was right. It was a complete disaster.”

Half a century later the scheme returned as mainstream form. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) put the fork back into the story’s hands, but on streaming: the hall became a remote control, the moderator a timer. Every Bandersnatch review had to explain why its branches do not matter “more”. That debate is the direct heir of 1967 (where the line runs). What Kinoautomat knew and Bandersnatch re-learned: legible choice and consequential choice are different design problems, and a converged spine is often the only affordable one. The full family of structures is mapped in my branching-structures guide; base definitions — in the pillar article on interactive cinema.

No official streaming release exists. Verified: a DVD edition followed the 2007 revival — restored picture, a newly recorded moderator, dubbed language options (English, German, Italian) — so the practical route today is the DVD or a retrospective screening. Screenings do happen — the verified timeline is in the table below; watch the programmes of film archives and cinematheques.