British Kinematography (1953)

November, 1953 SPOTTISWOODE '. CURRENT 2-D AND 3-D TRENDS 129 not greatly different in the horizontal and vertical planes, it is probable that the lens system is chiefly responsible for the fuzziness of the picture. I believe that a great deal more work will have to be done on the aberrations of anamorphotic lens systems before they can be considered photographically satisfactory. Meanwhile there is little doubt that audiences will be sufficiently awed by The Robe and its immediate successors to disregard blurred pictures, just as they overlook the dizzy distortions of Cinerama. Summarizing the possibilities of wide screen, Cinerama and CinemaScope in terms of impact, sensation and engulfment, I would say that they can be made to achieve everything that is possible with a purely flat picture, though at present at some considerable sacrifice of technical quality. Only Cinerama has elements of stereoscopic effect, but this does not appear except in shots where the camera is moving rapidly through the scene, a device which soon becomes a cliche. The presentation of perfectly flat images on a huge scale — or, as I have called it, the adoption of low viewing ratios — tends to produce a slowing down of the essential rhythm of the cinema, and also has a somewhat wearing effect on the eyes. In the short term however, it will produce a powerful impact on audiences, but if it is ever to become as popular as the 3 by 4 screen seen at uncritical viewing ratios, which has universalized itself over 60 years, it will need to become much more flexible in technique, and will also call for the reconstruction of most cinemas, with a consequent raising of admission prices. If the net income of the motion picture industry in America is to be stabilized (and it is in America alone that the full impact of TV competition has been felt), it may be necessary to cut down the number of theatres by closing another 5,000, in addition to the 5,000 already reported to be shut. On this supposition, only about 5,000 theatres would remain open in the whole of the U.S.A., and many small centres of population would be without a cinema for the first time in 40 years. While this was taking place, Hollywood production would be cut from the 3-400 pictures a year of the recent past to about 100 pictures, each of them, however, representing a much greater investment than the present average. The studio space no longer required for motion pictures would probably be absorbed by television. Stereoscopy Let us turn now to 3-D, the last stage in the ascending order of complexity and therefore, for reasons already given, the least likely to be universally adopted unless it can be very much simplified. The Hollywood conception of 3-D makes it out as little more than a gimmick or gadget for hurling rocks, baseballs, tomahawks, gunshots, etc., into the faces of the audience. This idea came from a pair of very short and very bad films made shortly before the war, these being the last 3-D films to be produced in Hollywood prior to Bwana Devil. As producers there are candid enough to admit, they " played 3-D for a fast buck," basing their estimate of the public's reaction on an even lower grade of sensation than the one I have singled out as a criterion. For several months the result was a riotous success, but the public soon sickened of an endless round of horrors and missiles. Before the saner producers could exploit the new medium, it was in danger of being run into the ground. In this country the error was avoided by exercise of a peculiarly English trait : the producers showed no interest whatever in any of the new techniques, and to-day, a year after the hullabaloo started, no wholly English company has made a Cinerama or CinemaScope picture, and only one 3-D feature has been produced. I have said that in its earliest phases the measurable depth dimension in 3-D— the one characteristic which distinguishes it from all the other new techniques — was chiefly utilized for launching things at the audience. A far more interesting and dramatically effective use of space has so far been ignored by Hollywood. The concept of the stereoscopic window had its origin decades ago, but it is only recently, and in this country, that it has been advantageously applied to film, This