British Kinematography (1953)

November, 1953 SPOTTISWOODE \ CURRENT 2-D AND 3-D TRENDS 127 by the fact that in England the more expensive seats are at the back of the house), and subject and object were held apart from one another in a relationship of detachment. As a technical consequence, the viewing ratio was extremely uncritical. The nearest spectator could be at 1 -2W (i.e. 1 -2 times the width of the screen) and the farthest at 6W or even 7W. It is on the basis of this uncritical ratio that almost all cinemas have been built, and that the exhibitors' profit margins have been established. But if engulfment is to be the order of the day, audiences will become much more critical as to where they sit. They will all want to sit between 1-5W and 2-5W — that is, in the front of the auditorium where fewest seats can be accommodated. Seats forward of this area will have to be removed or priced down because of complaints that the picture is fuzzy, as well as being so large that eyestrain is caused by trying to take it all in at once. Seats farther back than this area will also have to be priced down, since spectators sitting in them are likely to feel that they are not being engulfed, and that this " New Look " in the cinema is really " old hat." Now when greatly enlarged screens (which can preferably be described as low viewing ratios) have to be applied to very large theatres of 2-3,000 seats or more, far more drastic technical changes have to be made. Historically, the first of these was Cinerama. Now since the advent of CinemaScope it has been fashionable to decry Cinerama as gargantuan and unpractical. Gargantuan it certainly is. Cinerama is truly the dinosaur of the movies. Stalking around on the vast prairies which are its natural habitat, this monster is undeniably impressive ; but try and curl it up in the living room and you will have trouble in getting its tail in through the door or preventing its head from knocking the plaster off the ceiling. Of course the Cinerama producers know this, and they have wisely (as well as economically) eschewed all notion of stories and stars, and have put their show on as a 3-ring circus. And as a circus it is prodigiously successful. When Cinerama had been running for a year, I was assured both in New York and Los Angeles that people were going back to see it four, five, and even six times, and this at very high admission prices. It seems that they are unconscious of the gross perspective distortions which stem from the peculiar image geometry, of the lines which visibly divide the three panels, of the relative projector movement, and of the uneven balance of color between the different films. All they are aware of is the stunning physical impact of pictures — no matter how senseless — projected on so vast and highly curved a screen. By our criterion of sensation, Cinerama must be adjudged a great success, particularly as the high admission rates to the four theatres where it is now being shown have enabled the promoters to remove most of the poor seats from the house so that there are comparatively few complaints from the audience. Assuming that a Cinerama picture can be made to run six months to a year, and that only a very few houses are needed in order to show a profit, the demand for new product can be kept very small. This is fortunate, because the system is ill-adapted to all but the largest and simplest spectacles, and because the composition — the camera has triple lenses of only one focal length — tends to become monotonous, and the picture slow. Next in order comes CinemaScope, more complex than Cinerama in conception because of its ingenious anamorphotic lens system. Mr. Spyros Skouras is reported to have called CinemaScope " the poor man's Cinerama." This is rather an apt description, for it attempts to achieve Cinerama's impressiveness by means which are certainly very much cheaper and more practical. The end result, however, may or may not be the gold mine which its promoters confidently expect. As I have already said, CinemaScope was invented by Prof. Chretien of the Sorbonne whose uncommercial decision to give his anamorphotic system a compression ratio of 2 to 1, combined with Edison's 60-year old aspect ratio of 1-33 to 1, resulted in a final aspect ratio of 2-66, which has been only very slightly reduced by the necessity to accommodate the picture and four sound tracks on