The first time scenting was used in a movie theater was in 1906. Businessman Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, owner of what would later become the Roxy movie theater chain, used cotton balls soaked in rose oil and a fan system to flavoring a documentary about the Rose Bowl Game, a kind of football competition and flower arranging.
This first attempt led to a huge list of tests by other cinemas, using different perfumes and personnel in charge of scenting the room at the right time of the projection. For example, the use of the aroma of orange blossom during the musical show "Time for the Orange Trees to Bloom" that was projected at the Chinese Theater in Los Angeles is famous.
However, attempts to perfect this scent technique, in order to give viewers a fully immersive experience, continually ran into the same problem: the need to remove one scent before using another.
To put it in some way, the ventilation in the first theaters left something to be desired. For this reason, if they wanted to emphasize the roses in an image first, then the smell of dinner, the result was an amalgamation of smells that ended up saturating the room and creating a most unpleasant effect.
Without going any further, during the premiere of Angéle, by Marcel Pagnol in 1935, the atmosphere ended up so stale and unbreathable that the spectators were about to riot and destroy the cinema.
It should be said that almost 90 years later, ventilation systems and the technologies used to aromatize through micronebulization have advanced so much that perhaps the time has come to resume the attempts of these creative pioneers.
And what do you think, do we return to the seventh art the sense of smell?
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