Until the end of 1951, Hollywood movies and television sets had a perfect working relationship. That's because TV screens boasted exactly the same squarish shape as cinema screens. A width-to-height ratio of 4 x 3, or, as theatre projectionists put it, an "aspect ratio" of 1.31:1, was the single, universal standard. The studios' old-film libraries, as they were sold to TV could be broadcast with their pictorial compositions intact. The ratio of 1.31:1 is known as the academy format. But that cozy symbiosis ended forever in 1952. TV's popularity had cut deeply into box-office revenues, and Hollywood struck back with a weapon designed to permanently distinguish movie going from home viewing: a wider picture. A flood of new formats swelled aspect ratios to as much as 2.76:1
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Cinerama premiered in 1952, CinemaScope in 1953, VistaVision and SuperScope in 1954, Todd-AO in 1955, Panavision in 1957, Ultra Panavision 70 and Dyaliscope in 1959, and Techniscope in 1961, among dozens of others.
Directors, in a race for maximum rectangular opulence, crammed more and more information into individual shots. Cinematographers, using width to exploit the eye's heightened sensitivity to motion at the outer boundaries of vision -just think of the jump to hyperspace in Star Wars - helped make action films and other spectacles the prevailing film genres.
The earliest Cinerama and CinemaScope movies drew such a strong audience response, widescreen soon became obligatory. And the 1.33 frame quickly became an endangered species, meaning that virtually every post-mid-'50s movie you watch on video - unless fully letterboxed - has had its picture cropped, squeezed or otherwise altered to fit the shape of your TV. Here's a rundown of the most prevalent screen shapes forged during the widescreen revolution:
2.76:1-Cinerama, Camera 65, Ultra Panavision 70. Roughly 20 American-made features were shot between 1952 and 1966 in this overwhelmingly wide-aspect ratio. About half are on video, where they're hard to watch. Letterbox them more or less correctly (as MGM/UA has done for laserdiscs of Ben-Hur, Mutiny on the Bounty and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) and you end up with a sliver of a picture. Pan-and-scan them and you crop away more than half the image. (A third option is to squeeze the image from both sides, thereby cropping less but making everyone look anorexic.) Another effect impossible to capture on video is the curved, 146-degree screen used for Cinerama movies like How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. These films were shot on three separate strips of 35mm film which were then projected side by side in a horseshoe array. You can recognize the process on video by seams that show where the frames meet.
2.35:1-CinemaScope, Panavision, SuperScope, Techniscope. Thousands of movies have been photographed in these anamorphic processes, in which one lens squeezes a rectangular image onto a square frame of 35mm film and another lens unsqueezes it during projection. The earliest 'Scope movies have a broader 2.55 frame and sometimes exhibit, as in 1955's Oklahoma! (Cinemascope 55), severe distortion. Everything's too wide at the centre and too thin at the edges, especially in close-ups. These flaws were later corrected, but you'll still notice bowed vertical lines in anamorphic Spielberg extravaganzas of the '80s such as Poltergeist and the Indiana Jones series. Because many '50s and '60s directors tried to use every corner of the 2.35 frame, their work is damaged considerably by panning and scanning. Nowadays, few directors even work in the format (David Lynch and Blake Edwards are notable exceptions), and some that do make their compositions blandly "scansafe" by keeping the key elements of each shot clustered within a 1.33-shaped area.
2.05:1-65mm photography, 70mm exhibition: Todd-AO, Super Panavision 70. This was the Rolls Royce of film gauges, used through the mid-'60s for big-budget spectacles and musicals such as Around the World in 80 Days, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. A strip of film twice the size of standard 35mm was used both for the original negative and for theatrical prints. The result was a breathtakingly sharp, detailed, subtly coloured image that bested the quality of regular 35mm film as handily as a 35mm SLR camera beats a 110 cheapie Films shot in 65 could also be transferred "up" to a 35mm 'Scope aspect ratio (2.35) for theatres not equipped with 70min projectors and still look exceptional. The 65mm format pretty much disappeared after 1970, though films shot in 35min are now routinely blown up to 70mm for exhibition.
1.85:1-standard U.S. widescreen. Currently the prevailing aspect ratio for movies, 1.85 requires no special lenses or negatives. It's just standard 35mm film with the essential parts of each composition kept out of the top and bottom of the frame by the filmmakers. The resulting dead space or safety area is then either eliminated with a black hard matte during photography, or recorded on film but masked out by an aperture in the movie theatre's projector. The latter approach is typically used to satisfy dual aspect-ratio requirements: a 1.33 version for TV and video with the dead space added back in, and a 1.85 edition for the local multiplex with the image cropped claustrophobically tight.
2.66:1 This is the standard ratio for Super 8mm scope releases, slight cropping top and bottom can occur due to the shape of the Super 8mm frame. During the late 70's, Amimex a Dutch company released a number films in a process called Cineavision™. By putting black bars down each side of the frame, this gave a ratio of 2.35:1 thus retaining the full 35mm frame area. Most releases are now in 2.66:1 or non scope.
Super 35mm. This is 35mm film shot full frame, without any anamorphic lens. On cinema release the image is cropped top and bottom to give the scope shape, when seen on video the whole frame or selected areas can be used. The scope shape still gives a better ratio.
For a excellent look at the widescreen scene go to the link pages.
TO BE CONTINUED
This page was last updated 02 Dec 2002
