Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1953)

183 ground seemed almost full size. And, in contrast to Cinerama, it was a great relief to be rid of the imperfect vertical joins between Cinerama's three panels (frames) projected side-by-side on the screen. With the joins, of course, went all the other problems induced by the simultaneous use of three projectors (difference in brilliance, projector jump, etc.). Distortion of horizontal lines also was less obvious. DEFINITION DEGRADED But CinemaScope's colors seemed washed out by comparison; the image was on the dim side and lacking in detail. This lack of detail became increasingly obvious in the rushes which followed from How to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Robe. Closeups and medium shots were not too bad. But whenever Marilyn Monroe danced too far away from the camera, her fascinating features disintegrated into meaningless blobs; the effect was similar to the unhappy television phenomenon which causes the cowboy and his horse to dissolve into a mass of protoplasm (or something equally amorphous) as they ride into the sunset. Particularly disappointing was the very direct comparison with Cinerama offered by a sequence taken from the nose of an airplane. This rather low standard of picture quality is easily understood when we realize the odds against which CinemaScope technicians must work. Unlike Cinerama, which uses three films in three different projectors, with a 6 sprocket frame half again as high as the standard 35mm. aperture, CinemaScope gets along with only one film having a standard 4 sprocket frame. To create the broad screen shape (nearly three times as wide as it is tall), a cylindrical anamorphic lens, developed originally by the French scientist Henri Chretien, is mounted ahead of the normal camera lens. This auxiliary lens compresses the picture horizontally on the film, making the actors skinny as toothpicks. A complementary anamorphic lens on the standard 35mm. projector spreads the picture out once again onto the panoramic screen and returns the actors to their normal well-fed proportions. Thus, to fill a screen of essentially the same size, Cinerama uses 4^2 times the film area that CinemaScope has available. This is more than the difference in frame area between 8mm. and 16mm. movie film, and certainly no one would expect to get equivalent detail when projecting 8 and 16mm. on the same size screen. Added to this fixed difference in film area are Eastman Color and then printed in Technicolor. Since the color balance of the two processes differs somewhat, the color tones of the finished print suffered accordingly. Cinerama, on the other hand, is famous for its brilliant, breath-taking Technicolor. And the brilliance is more than a figure of speech. So much light bounces off the screen at the audience that one could easily read a newspaper in the front section of the Cinerama theatre. At the CinemaScope demonstration, by contrast, I could not even see where my notebook was, and had to write strictly by feel. Obviously, less light can be had from one projector than from the three of Cinerama. And furthermore, what light there is from this single source must be distributed over three times the area of each Cinerama panel. This deficiency cannot be compensated for merely by turning up the arc intensity without burning through the image and washing out the color still further. But, in one sense, the dimmer picture of CinemaScope is an advantage. Because the human eye is more sensitive to flicker in its peripheral vision area, Cinerama has found it necessary to shoot and project its pictures at 26 frames per second. But since human tolerance of flicker also varies inversely with picture brilliance (it is generally in the highlights, for instance, that we notice flicker even at 16 frames per second in home movies), CinemaScope gets along nicely at 24 frames per second without perceptible flicker. AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION? To me, the feeling of depth and sense of participation in the film was far greater with Cinerama than with CinemaScope. This is undoubtedly due in part to the difference in angular coverage between the two techniques. Cinerama, with its three lenses set 48 degrees apart, covers 146 degrees horizontally, closely [Continued on page 188] 20th Century-Fox the optical losses in definition imposed by the auxiliary lenses. DIMINUTION OF LIGHT All in all, I felt that CinemaScope engineers did a remarkable technological job. And I doubt that there is very much room for improvement. But it takes a lot of courage to screen a one-inch wide picture over 65 feet. Another factor working against CinemaScope — at least in its initial demonstration— was the fact that it was photographed in EFFECT of the anamorphic lens in recording compressed image of standard film frame proportion is seen right, with expanded reproduction below in panel-like dimensions of CinemaScope.