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Widescreen Cinema
Ladies and Gentlemen: This is Cinerama. With these words, on September 30, 1952, the heavy red curtains in New York's Broadway Theatre opened on a panoramic, Technicolor image of the Rockaways Playland Atom-Smasher Roller Coaster. The cinematic transformation heralded by this giddy ride was, however, neither as sudden nor as straightforward as it seemed. Widescreen Cinema leads readers through the twists and turns and decades it took for film to change its shape and, along the way, shows how this fitful process reflects the vagaries of cultural history.
- GenresFilm
312 pages, Hardcover
First published November 6, 1992
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June 19, 2022
Written over a period of more then ten years and published in 1992, this still seems to be the most comprehensive history of widescreen cinema.
I like how he stakes out the terrain in the first page. Though of course then the whole first part of the book is a discussion of how Cinerama was not the first widescreen format…. By several decades.
He talks about where the 4:3 aspect ratio came from. 4:3 was arrived at for efficiency and maybe also some other reasons of circumstance. Still photos from Edison’s and Eastman’s mass produced setups were circular for example so it wasn’t just about taking still photo conventions and using them for motion.
Why did 35mm film became a standard? It was an efficient use of the most common still photography film, 70mm.
Funny but it appears the first widescreen formats weren’t really about aesthetics but rather were a way to get around patent protections.
He discusses examples of a variable aspect ratio movies, like Able Gance’s “Napoleon.”
Very little about the science of vision is mentioned in the first set of experiments in the pre-sound era. A little is mentioned about aesthetics and ideas of golden ratios, and classical paintings...which one might infer was a kind of folk-science based on hundreds of years of figuring out what works best in other mediums and then drawing on that "knowledge" when trying different approaches in cinema in the pre-sound era.
The author spends a good bit of time documenting the movie theater business in the context of changing economic and social realities in the US during the Depression, the Second World War, and after. In short, sound was enough of a headache, format war, and novelty that both industry and audiences had little appetite for more innovation between the late twenties and the early fifties— even going so far as to enter into legal agreements to not put forward competing technologies like incompatible widescreen formats.
Then the studio system got shook up, everyone came home from the war, moved to the suburbs, got good jobs, TVs, cars and lots of outdoor hobbies, more free time, etc. (I’m being sarcastic with the word “everyone” but from a soci economic standpoint that is sort of what the US looked like at the time.)
While people often discuss widescreen cinema as a response to television, he finds a stronger relationship with the emerging leisure time activities of the new suburbs: golf, camping, swimming, hunting, travel, tennis etc etc. all of which existed before but were now within reach of average working class Americans like never before. That is, audiences didn’t want to be an audience, they wanted an immersions engaging psychological participatory experience. The giant screen was not a big TV but more like going on a vacation and experiencing new slightly strange things in a way that was so overwhelming audiences would flock to the corner drug store at intermission to buy Dramamine.
That idea of spectacle is exemplified by the first technological and commercial widescreen system to win big in the 1950s in the US, Cinerama….. which in part due to technical limitations— but also due to what was easy to make spectacle of—made their name with travelogue non narrative movies.
And while they may have reverse engineered the science they claimed to have some reasons for their format size and aspect ratio and level of immersion. So, the science behind the Cinerama aspect ratio is based on the notion that human vision is natively an aspect ratio of 2.75:1.
By the end of the 1950s, three strip/film/camera/projector Cinerama was on the way out. The limitations, costs, etc, weren't offset by the commercial success of the productions. Cinerama in name, and the aggressively curved massive screens associated with it, survived into the 1970s. But starting around 1960 it turned into a single camera/film/projector setup that compromised the original intent -- leading to some "Cinerama" movies like 2001 looking better on a large flat wide screen instead of on a traditional curved Cinerama screen (according to those that saw it both ways at the time). The technology (and related ones that were even more extreme, complicated and immersive, persisted for decades as amusement park attractions).
It would be short sighted to call it a failure across the board. While the original technology faded from prominence, it firmly established the aesthetic of very wide screen images, of movies as spectacle, etc, and paved the way for more manageable formats like Cinemascope, Panavision, etc., that have endured and formed the basis for state of the art production and projection for the second half of the 20th century.
Ever wonder where the nomenclature for “flat” versus “anamorphic“ or “widescreen” came from?
Apparently the first wave of 2.35ish film technologies in the 1950s felt like they were competing with the 3d fad at the time, and wanted to claim their level of immersion creating dimensionality like a 3d movie…..I’m contrast to not widescreen movies that they called “flat.”
I had always associated stereo sound innovations with the rise of the summer blockbuster, Star Wars, etc, in the late 70s…..and would anticipate when watching a movie from before 1980 that it usually would be in mono, and that movies released in the 80s were often in stereo (often with matrixed surround info), etc.
But now I see that Fox as the leader / owner of CinemaScope tried to make stereo sound the industry standard in the early 1950s……which many exhibitors objected to on the grounds of cost.
Eventually a compromise is using multiple soundtracks on a single print was reached. This means many of these films when released on home video today can have authentic multichannel sound even though they were probably heard in mono in most theater for most of their theatrical history.
This also explains why CinemaScope ended up being 2.35:1 instead of the original wider plan of more like 2.66.
And then by the end of the 50s, CinemaScope became “normal”.
Fox toyed with a higher definition version called CinemaScope55 but only shot two films in it, didn’t release them in it, and decided that instead of coming up with their own answer to the competing ToddAO format (with its higher image quality) they would just buy ToddAO.
CinemaScope would persist until the late 1960s by which time Panavision (which had several technical economic and operational advantages) invented in the late 50s, would eclipse it.
He then talks about the rise of multiplex’s in the 1960s, either as older theaters with a single auditorium that were subdivided into two or four theaters, or, as newly built parts of the eras suburban shopping malls. Eventually these were almost universally constructed with 1.85:1 screens. (When he says “today” he is speaking in 1992.)
He also discusses how post 1948 films at the majors were effectively embargoed for presentation on television because of contractual agreements with talent codified in 1951 when television was emerging. But that by 1961 the post 1948 catalog began to be offered. The first major studio film broadcast from the widescreen era was the second fox feature in CinemaScope, How to Marry a Millionaire……which was also the debut of pan n scan of a major widescreen movie, though letterboxing was briefly considered. And of course many flat widescreen films originally intended for display at 1.66 or 1.85 were shown full frame on TV, often with unintended consequences.
The book ends with a discussion of how home video and theatrical revenue are at parity, and that the future belongs to revenue from home viewing. He doesn’t hold out hood that laserdiscs with their common use of letterboxing are a solution. He talks a bit about how people shooting in widescreen since the 70s have altered their composition to accommodate the inevitable pan and scan tv and vhs presentation, anyway. He mentions that Scorsese wanted to shoot his films in 2.35 but settled on 1.85 so they would be less butchered on tv screens.
And he briefly mentions this new fangled, planned hdtv technology “coming soon,” with an aspect ratio of 1.78 but he doesn’t hold out much hope for it making much of a difference.
----
A final note on this book:
There are a couple of sections in the start and one in the end where he tries to tie together various forms of film criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, theory, etc. These add almost nothing to the book, neither to its thesis nor its content. One can readily skip those chapters and lose nothing other than the pain of watching the author contort ideas to make his thesis seem to fit into a larger context of big thinkers. (Maybe they are remnants of the books genesis as a dissertation? Maybe they were necessary to try to elevate the subject from pop culture tourism into serious academic writing. At this point I think they serve to put off readership that would find the rest of the book quite interesting.)
I like how he stakes out the terrain in the first page. Though of course then the whole first part of the book is a discussion of how Cinerama was not the first widescreen format…. By several decades.
He talks about where the 4:3 aspect ratio came from. 4:3 was arrived at for efficiency and maybe also some other reasons of circumstance. Still photos from Edison’s and Eastman’s mass produced setups were circular for example so it wasn’t just about taking still photo conventions and using them for motion.
Why did 35mm film became a standard? It was an efficient use of the most common still photography film, 70mm.
Funny but it appears the first widescreen formats weren’t really about aesthetics but rather were a way to get around patent protections.
He discusses examples of a variable aspect ratio movies, like Able Gance’s “Napoleon.”
Very little about the science of vision is mentioned in the first set of experiments in the pre-sound era. A little is mentioned about aesthetics and ideas of golden ratios, and classical paintings...which one might infer was a kind of folk-science based on hundreds of years of figuring out what works best in other mediums and then drawing on that "knowledge" when trying different approaches in cinema in the pre-sound era.
The author spends a good bit of time documenting the movie theater business in the context of changing economic and social realities in the US during the Depression, the Second World War, and after. In short, sound was enough of a headache, format war, and novelty that both industry and audiences had little appetite for more innovation between the late twenties and the early fifties— even going so far as to enter into legal agreements to not put forward competing technologies like incompatible widescreen formats.
Then the studio system got shook up, everyone came home from the war, moved to the suburbs, got good jobs, TVs, cars and lots of outdoor hobbies, more free time, etc. (I’m being sarcastic with the word “everyone” but from a soci economic standpoint that is sort of what the US looked like at the time.)
While people often discuss widescreen cinema as a response to television, he finds a stronger relationship with the emerging leisure time activities of the new suburbs: golf, camping, swimming, hunting, travel, tennis etc etc. all of which existed before but were now within reach of average working class Americans like never before. That is, audiences didn’t want to be an audience, they wanted an immersions engaging psychological participatory experience. The giant screen was not a big TV but more like going on a vacation and experiencing new slightly strange things in a way that was so overwhelming audiences would flock to the corner drug store at intermission to buy Dramamine.
That idea of spectacle is exemplified by the first technological and commercial widescreen system to win big in the 1950s in the US, Cinerama….. which in part due to technical limitations— but also due to what was easy to make spectacle of—made their name with travelogue non narrative movies.
And while they may have reverse engineered the science they claimed to have some reasons for their format size and aspect ratio and level of immersion. So, the science behind the Cinerama aspect ratio is based on the notion that human vision is natively an aspect ratio of 2.75:1.
By the end of the 1950s, three strip/film/camera/projector Cinerama was on the way out. The limitations, costs, etc, weren't offset by the commercial success of the productions. Cinerama in name, and the aggressively curved massive screens associated with it, survived into the 1970s. But starting around 1960 it turned into a single camera/film/projector setup that compromised the original intent -- leading to some "Cinerama" movies like 2001 looking better on a large flat wide screen instead of on a traditional curved Cinerama screen (according to those that saw it both ways at the time). The technology (and related ones that were even more extreme, complicated and immersive, persisted for decades as amusement park attractions).
It would be short sighted to call it a failure across the board. While the original technology faded from prominence, it firmly established the aesthetic of very wide screen images, of movies as spectacle, etc, and paved the way for more manageable formats like Cinemascope, Panavision, etc., that have endured and formed the basis for state of the art production and projection for the second half of the 20th century.
Ever wonder where the nomenclature for “flat” versus “anamorphic“ or “widescreen” came from?
Apparently the first wave of 2.35ish film technologies in the 1950s felt like they were competing with the 3d fad at the time, and wanted to claim their level of immersion creating dimensionality like a 3d movie…..I’m contrast to not widescreen movies that they called “flat.”
I had always associated stereo sound innovations with the rise of the summer blockbuster, Star Wars, etc, in the late 70s…..and would anticipate when watching a movie from before 1980 that it usually would be in mono, and that movies released in the 80s were often in stereo (often with matrixed surround info), etc.
But now I see that Fox as the leader / owner of CinemaScope tried to make stereo sound the industry standard in the early 1950s……which many exhibitors objected to on the grounds of cost.
Eventually a compromise is using multiple soundtracks on a single print was reached. This means many of these films when released on home video today can have authentic multichannel sound even though they were probably heard in mono in most theater for most of their theatrical history.
This also explains why CinemaScope ended up being 2.35:1 instead of the original wider plan of more like 2.66.
And then by the end of the 50s, CinemaScope became “normal”.
Fox toyed with a higher definition version called CinemaScope55 but only shot two films in it, didn’t release them in it, and decided that instead of coming up with their own answer to the competing ToddAO format (with its higher image quality) they would just buy ToddAO.
CinemaScope would persist until the late 1960s by which time Panavision (which had several technical economic and operational advantages) invented in the late 50s, would eclipse it.
He then talks about the rise of multiplex’s in the 1960s, either as older theaters with a single auditorium that were subdivided into two or four theaters, or, as newly built parts of the eras suburban shopping malls. Eventually these were almost universally constructed with 1.85:1 screens. (When he says “today” he is speaking in 1992.)
He also discusses how post 1948 films at the majors were effectively embargoed for presentation on television because of contractual agreements with talent codified in 1951 when television was emerging. But that by 1961 the post 1948 catalog began to be offered. The first major studio film broadcast from the widescreen era was the second fox feature in CinemaScope, How to Marry a Millionaire……which was also the debut of pan n scan of a major widescreen movie, though letterboxing was briefly considered. And of course many flat widescreen films originally intended for display at 1.66 or 1.85 were shown full frame on TV, often with unintended consequences.
The book ends with a discussion of how home video and theatrical revenue are at parity, and that the future belongs to revenue from home viewing. He doesn’t hold out hood that laserdiscs with their common use of letterboxing are a solution. He talks a bit about how people shooting in widescreen since the 70s have altered their composition to accommodate the inevitable pan and scan tv and vhs presentation, anyway. He mentions that Scorsese wanted to shoot his films in 2.35 but settled on 1.85 so they would be less butchered on tv screens.
And he briefly mentions this new fangled, planned hdtv technology “coming soon,” with an aspect ratio of 1.78 but he doesn’t hold out much hope for it making much of a difference.
----
A final note on this book:
There are a couple of sections in the start and one in the end where he tries to tie together various forms of film criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, theory, etc. These add almost nothing to the book, neither to its thesis nor its content. One can readily skip those chapters and lose nothing other than the pain of watching the author contort ideas to make his thesis seem to fit into a larger context of big thinkers. (Maybe they are remnants of the books genesis as a dissertation? Maybe they were necessary to try to elevate the subject from pop culture tourism into serious academic writing. At this point I think they serve to put off readership that would find the rest of the book quite interesting.)
June 11, 2018
Comprehensive history of widescreen formats and widefilm. Rather than take the easy approach of starting with Cinerama in the early 50s, Belton gets down to the dirty history of examining false starts in widescreen cinema back to the 19th century (and earlier, dipping into panoramas and similar carnival fare).
This is also a book that is a very specific type of history, from those who came of age in the 80s and raised on Allen & Gomery's seminal Film History: Theory and Practice. This was the style of history pushed in my grad program, so it felt like a sort of warm blanket. Not particularly modern in writing style, but I really enjoy it for not entirely rational reasons.
Perhaps auspiciously, I read this right as Drafthouse announced they were introducing new 60' curved screens at select locations. What's old is new again, again.
This is also a book that is a very specific type of history, from those who came of age in the 80s and raised on Allen & Gomery's seminal Film History: Theory and Practice. This was the style of history pushed in my grad program, so it felt like a sort of warm blanket. Not particularly modern in writing style, but I really enjoy it for not entirely rational reasons.
Perhaps auspiciously, I read this right as Drafthouse announced they were introducing new 60' curved screens at select locations. What's old is new again, again.
June 7, 2025
Wastes little time diving into the collage of names and dates with little care for whether or not the reader is on board. That said, it's insightfully detailed and cleverly worded enough to keep it from becoming stale. Plus it's just a subject I like.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews