British Kinematography (1953)

128 BRITISH KIMMAIOC.RAPHY Vol. 23, No. 5 one strip of film. Now an aspect ratio of about 2-5 means that in many cinemas where the width of the proscenium is not very great, the actual height of the new screen may be less than that of the old. This results in what has been called a " letter-box effect, " because of the strip-like impression which a spectator receives at the back of the house. I speak advisedly of badly built cinemas and badly placed spectators because, with the huge investments which the film industry is making in CinemaScope pictures, distribution will have to be effected not merely to half a dozen or half a hundred cinemas, but to thousands of cinemas all over the world. This will result in a depreciation of the value of CinemaScope, for the critical viewing ratio which is an absolute condition of audience engulfment and heightened impact, cannot be maintained under varied and adverse conditions. The high aspect ratio also poses difficult problems of composition, for when attention is concentrated in the centre of the screen, the wide wings tend to become empty and lifeless. It may well be that vignetting techniques will soon be introduced, by which the effective area of the screen could be varied at will. Once audiences had grown accustomed to these, they would readily accept them. In a world which changes as rapidly as ours does, and in which the image is again taking precedence over the written word, visual conventions are soon made and unmade. A soft and gradual change in the effective screen area could thus allow the focus of attention to be narrowed and again enlarged as the story demanded. But far more than this is possible. Abel Gance, another French precursor of 20th-century Fox, in his famous triptych film Napoleon, produced in 1928 and revived in original form with the aid of linked projectors at the Venice Film Festival of 1953, made use of the three sections of the screen for simultaneous cross-cutting, so that the action could be single or plural, parallel or conflicting, and dissolves and other optical effects took place in space as well as time. In this astonishing production, even contrasts of colour were effected by contrasted tinting of the three screen sections, ending, it need hardly be said, with the Tricolor of France itself ! All this wealth of technical possibility is at the disposal of CinemaScope, and with the far greater convenience of employing only a single film. By some such modification as this, one of the most burdensome handicaps of CinemaScope could be overcome : I mean the slowness and staginess of the gigantic tableau of the 60-foot screen — or the viewing ratio of less than 1 -5 W. One of the most respected American film critics, Mr. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, remarks of The Robe : " The graphic development of spiritual experience is attempted in static displays. The consequence is that the essence of the drama does not come through. A sense of personal exaltation is simply not conveyed, and the movement is not sufficient to keep the huge screen alive . . . It is apparent that intimate personal drama may be lost in such insistent and inflexible largeframing. It is perilous — if not wrong — for the intimate thing. Also there is a serious question as to the width and plane of CinemaScope. It may be too wide and distant for the convenience and comfort of the eyes. Unlike Cinerama, which gives a full " wrap-around " effect and compels a conscious eye movement to take in both sides of the screen, CinemaScope seems to tempt the observer to get the whole screen in one fix. . . . This causes the eyes to "stretch'* which can, after two hours, cause discomfort." And he concludes : " There's more to be said. And it will be." I have pointed out some ways in which CinemaScope could be made less inflexible than it is to-day ; but there remains the fact that no encircling effect is achieved. Though the claim that the picture is shown on a curved screen is strictly true, it is devoid of all significance for the spectator. The curve is too small to have the slightest beneficial effect on the nearness of the wings, and the picture would in fact look slightly less distorted on a flat screen. From a technical standpoint, the chief defect of present-day anamorphotic systems is the poor image quality they reproduce. The Eastman Colour emulsions, under the unprecedented horizontal magnification of nearly 1,000, must bear some part of the responsibility, but since the resolution seems