Technique of Film Editing, Reissue of 2nd Edition, 2nd Edition

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General

“ Widescreen ” as we now loosely term it, was certainly the fi rst signifi cant technical development of the fi f-

ties. It is a term applied to the variety of screen ratios devised to supersede the 1:1.33 rectangle which had

been the average screen shape throughout the cinema’s history. It describes the fi rst and perhaps the best-

known process, 20th-century Fox’s Cinemascope, as well as the numerous rival processes patented, under the

stimulus of competition, by other companies, fi rst in Hollywood and later throughout the world.

In the early fi fties the rapid post-war d ecline in cinema attendances continued. The novel impact of wide-

screen was the industry’s response to this economic threat. The old proportions of 1:1.33 were a convention

deriving from the size of the Edison/Dixon Kinetoscope, strengthened by usage and the commercial require-

ment of uniformity. Attempts were frequently made to circumvent the limitations of the shape. One of the

best-known early examples occurs in Griffi th’s Intolerance , where he masks the sides of the frame to strengthen

the impression of height as a soldier falls from the walls of Babylon. Masking devices, especially the iris, were

an early method of altering screen size in the interest of composition.

For a few years after the introduction of sound the frame became square to accommodate the sound-track, but

the former proportions were resumed when the height of the image was slightly reduced. Various proposals

have been put forward over the years for the ideal dynamic screen shape, infi nitely adaptable, always appropriate.

Despite the triple-screen method developed by Abel Gance no real advance towards a solution has been made.

Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1961) uses masking devices freely and effectively, but they remain an expensive, awkward

and still unaccepted form, and they are still, of course, tied to the overall dimension of the normal widescreen.

The widescreen itself, for all practical purposes, was invented by the French professor Henri Chr é tien as long

ago as 1927. His method was to compress a wide picture, by means of an anamorphic

1

lens, on to normal

35 mm. fi lm stock and to enlarge it once more in projection by use of a compensating lens. Nobody took any

notice of his invention at the time.

But it was in Chr é tien’s Anamorphoscope that 20th-century Fox now found what they were looking for.

They revived it and christened the new process Cinemascope.

Chapter 16

Widescreen

1

There are suggestions that “ anamorphotic ” is a more correct usage, but this is the more current one .