Tammy Burnstock is a believer in what scents can add to watching a film, and she doesn’t mean the tang of popcorn and occasionally fried chicken that sometimes dominates multiplexes. Instead, she’s an advocate for the power of carefully curated scents, either wafting around a cinema or perhaps triggered with a scratch-and-sniff card, in enhancing storytelling. Tammy Burnstock is one of the organisers of a scratch-and-sniff screening of Female Trouble at the Sydney Underground Film Festival.
Credit: Janie Barrett . “The world is catching up to smell,” she says. Burnstock, a director and event producer, along with self-described independent media archaeologist Jas Brooks have curated smells for a 50th anniversary screening of the camp comedy Female Trouble in Sydney next month.
“As John Waters’ devotees, we’ll be pleasing everybody with both good and bad smells,” Brooks says. “It is, after all, a film by the Pope of Trash.” While there were earlier attempts to add scents to movies, the process is best known from short-lived American systems like Smell-O-Rama, AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision that existed from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The 1960 Denholm Elliott-Elizabeth Taylor thriller Scent of Mystery screened with perfume accompanying the appearance of a woman in danger, pipe tobacco for the male villain and the smells of roses, coffee, shoe polish, brandy and other everyday items. Its posters carried a comically overstated boast about the importance of the techn.