It’s a popular misconception that film and video are supposed to be merely recorded plays. Not everybody works from this assumption. VJs and video artists, for instance, usually work more with pure imagery. People have just been conditioned over several generations to assume that a “movie” needs to have people talking about something, but it’s really not the case, and probably not the best use of the medium.
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Our media consumption is generally too passive. Generally. Sometimes you just want to be alone and commune with the flicker and glow.
Is the Cinerama Dome still open these days?
I haven’t been in; although when I was in LA that one time I was fortunate enough to see Kinji Fukasaku’s Black Lizard in the Egyptian, with a director Q&A afterward. What a place!
The best movie theaters I’ve been to were in Budapest, Hungary, 92-95. There were so many experiments going on, no that virtually all restrictions were gone (and the Hungarian economy had been pretty “open” by Iron Curtain standards already). Lots of little pop-up theaters attached to bookstores where we watched nth generation tapes of movies in English with Norwegian subtitles, or something like that. Even small “We’re only a theater” theaters that were thrown up on a budget, tastefully, with moveable chairs and the like. And then there were the old theater palaces that had been converted for movies before WWII, grand palaces the likes of which hardly exist anymore even in America. I saw Coppola’s Dracula in one of these, a fantastically creepy terrifying experience, with the audio cranked way to high; with the light-flashes high chandeliers started moving when I wasn’t paying attention, and every over-amped thump had everybody jumping in their seats. I saw the film a couple weeks later in more modern (non-budget) theater, with normal sound amplification. The film was okay.
However, just about every theater also had a coffee-shop-cum-bar. You could drink to match the movie-poster colors!
Now I’m also remembering a PA theater called “Box of Light” or summat that worked with digital projectors (probably lots more like it); they’d project little squares and fragments onto the white sets, Images set up so that portions would fall on different pieces and appear distinct.
It was closed for a couple years for restoration, and reopened as the centerpiece of the first Arclight complex. They finally got around to installing all three projectors, so it was finally equipped to show the 3-strip Cinerama movies it was built for. I saw This is Cinerama and How The West Was Won in 3-strip Cinerama there, and that was pretty nifty. But you really gotta sit very near the center; the curvature of the screen makes every other viewing angle wonky. And subtitles smile at you. Also, they didn’t do the one thing I hoped they would: increase the space between rows. I’m 6’2" and my knees touch the seatbacks in front of me in that theater. After the first midnight screening of Return of the King ended, I stood up, stretched painfully, and decided that life’s too short for that shit. I love all the rest of the Arclight theaters, but the Dome’s too uncomfortable for 3-hour movies, as far as I’m concerned.
Alas, the Cinematheque kinda ruined that place. I used to go there in the early 90s when I lived in Hollywood, and it was a run-down (if still incredibly opulent) second-run theater where every show was $2. They could have tripled their prices and still been the cheapest movie theater in Hollywood. But now, even though their programming is excellent, the theater itself is somewhat ruined by being split into two theaters, and the main auditorium now seats slightly more than a third of its former 1,760-person capacity.
The Chinese has been properly restored, but man, what a tourist trap. And the El Capitan across the street is amazing, though it mostly shows Disney movies, complete with a song-and-dance floor show beforehand. Kinda spendy, but worth it if you love going out to the movies.
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Well, doesn’t work for me either. I have a $500 Sony Bravia with a 45" screen (decent-size, but nowhere near the seventy-inch screen that $2100 will get you at Best Buy, and positively puny next to the eighty-five-inch 4K monstrosity that the truly ostentatious plutocrat can have one of the staff pick up for a mere $25k) and I sit about nine feet away. To match that, my phone needs to be less than 7 inches from my eyes (which is a bit short for my aging eyes to focus on comfortably), plus I need to be holding it. And the sound is awful.
At any rate, even my not-tiny TV isn’t ideal for cinematic immersion. When I go to the movies, I sit up close (sixth row, as a rule) and like to fill my field of view with the screen. Even my TV falls short unless I stand 18" from the screen.
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Well, there you go. I watch TV in the corner of my computer monitor. Despite being a “digital artist” I am not that interested in putting my paltry entertainment budget into equipment.
I should have restricted the test to the bar or pub. That is where I have done it with great success in proving my point. Guy on next stool, “I would never watch TV on such a tiny screen.” Me, “Look, I have to hold my phone way out here to make it as small as the TV over there.” Other guy,“Golly!” (Turns away to hide uncontrollable eye-rolling.)
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I have an 10 inch ipad, a 39 inch TV (five or six feet away), and a 22 inch computer monitor 2 feet away. I still prefer my TV, possibly because it has more accurate colors, possibly because it isn’t smudged like my ipad, possibly because it’s connected to the best speakers. possibly because I don’t have to hold it, possibly because I prefer to browse the web on my ipad rather tahn fill the space up with video, possibly because my desk chair isn’t that comfortable, and possibly because 5 feet away is outside my personal space-- all reasons that trump the angle of view argument.
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To those I would only add that streaming is significantly smoother and more reliable on my Netflix-equipped Blu-ray deck than my phone has ever been able to manage, either through WiFi or 4G. But my Droid RAZR is not new. My wife’s new iPhone 6 Plus just showed up via FedEx yesterday, and I’m keen to see how well it streams with my household’s WiFi.
Plus, I can hold it an inch or three farther away. 
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From David Bordwells, site, a 1985 article
[Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism][1]
and a later book chapter focusing specifically on cinemascope, and anamorphic lenses
[Cinemascope: The Modern Miracle You see without glasses][2]
Cinerama, had its own set of problems-- you couldn’t position actors across the “seamlines” of the picture, for instance.
There’s a documentary/commentary on Star Trek IV in which the director (Nimoy) explains the limitations of Pan and Scan when it comes to his film-- one of his examples, IIRC, shows three of his actors sitting in a bench seat holding a conversation. If you pan and scan it, it’s hard to keep track of the emotional reactions. But the shot was designed for the format-- if you know that 4:3 is going to be the projected format, you can design the shots in a different style.
For instance, two people sitting side by side in a car-- in widescreen, that’s two head shots. In something like “Rules of the game” the frame can include more body language.
[1]: http://www.davidbordwell.net/articles/Bordwell_Velvet%20Light%20Trap_no21_summer1985_118.pdf
[2]: http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/poetics_10cinemascope.pdf
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positively puny next to the eighty-five-inch 4K monstrosity that the truly ostentatious plutocrat can have one of the staff pick up for a mere $25k
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That first link gives forth a 404, though the second one works.
I remember a few movies that took full advantage of a 2.35 framing that ended up causing trouble for pan & scan versions later on. The Magnificent Seven had a few conversations between people at the extreme far corners of the frame, and watching that movie in anything other than a letterboxed format (or projected on a big screen) really makes it seem cutty. And I had a bootleg copy of The Empire Strikes Back on Beta when I was a kid, several years before the legitimate video release. When the star destroyers are pursuing the Falcon into the asteroid field, there’s one shot wherein a large asteroid completely obliterates the bridge of one ship. We cut to the interior of the Executor to find Darth Vader issuing instructions to his commanders, who all appear via hologram. The commander on the far left is the one on the ship that just got destroyed. His hologram glances to the side, reacts in horror, and vanishes in a wave of static, while Vader doesn’t even bother to notice. It’s a clever little sight gag that I missed on my bootleg Beta, since it was made as a 4x3 center-cut dub with no panning and scanning; the hologram dude is simply too far off to the left to be visible in a 4x3 center-cut.
Since I work in TV, the mandate is to have all action take place in the “4x3 safe” area of the frame. I’ve known a couple of directors who actually tried to flout that rule, and we had to patiently explain that there are still a whole lot of 4x3 tube TVs out there in our audience, so if they want to get all John Sturges in their framing, they should work in a different medium for now.
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Heh. That room’s gonna sound like ass.
It’s an ultra short throw projector. It costs $50,000. Perfect for getting a 147 inch TV installed on a whim. If you were less whimsical, and willing to wait, you could have a more conventional, and less expensive projector installed in a more appropriate space.
fixed.
Ah, some day, when my ship rolls in…
Thanks for fixing that link. I am unfamiliar with Bordwell, and I’m gonna keep reading his article you linked, but after only the first page I’m having trouble finding it any less masturbatory than the worst auteurist bloviation out there. I’ll just post this wee screenshot here as a for-example:
So… widening the rectangle is somehow “the end of editing”? I dunno, seems like he burns a lot of words going on and on about how the shape of the frame gives a director loads of freedom to be more creatively expressive. Call me Philistine, but I am unconvinced that Preminger couldn’t have shown that damned valise floating down the river in a narrower aspect ratio than CinemaScope. And I can’t help but wonder if Hitchcock’s movies would have been considered any better had he chosen to shoot in CinemaScope. Guess we’ll never know.
The Jacques Rivette quote in the other article made me laugh out loud. “…this extreme use of the breadth of the screen, the physical separation of the characters, empty spaces distended by fear or desire, like lateral units, all seems to me to be–much more than depth–the language of true filmmakers, and the sign of maturity and mastery.” Such staging is, to my unschooled and utterly amateur way of thinking, another tool in the toolbox, but hardly the “sign of mastery.” Any hack can shoot two characters in opposing corners of a widescreen frame in an attempt to show emotional distance between them; it’s not exactly a subtle trick.
Well, anyway. It’s nice to know that people can still make a living thinking about such things.
A translation of Bazin’s essay: Fin du Montage It was published in January 1954. The format premiered in 1953, and of course, this was before Panavision released better optics in 1958.
As for Hitchcock, he worked for Paramount, which used VistaVision instead of Cinemascope. I believe he favored 1:1.85 for his – the narrower of the two formats still in use today. With regard to the “end of editing”, Hitchcock did minimize his cuts in “Rope”, a 1:1.37 film, though Bazin was not impressed.)
(Bazin believed that montage, or, simply “cutting”, was an holdover of the silent film era. Then, a consistent pattern of cuts were used to punctuate dialogue.)
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Well, yeah. One would need to cut in order to insert a card of dialogue, after all. But why does he think a movie should best be presented with as few cuts as possible? That’s certainly a viable choice for a director, but the intervening decades between now and then should provide sufficient evidence that long uninterrupted takes are the exception rather than the rule, even in the finest films. It’s simply not applicable to every dramatic scenario. Occasions where movies use long uninterrupted takes (like the opening of Touch of Evil or, in the extreme cases, Rope or Russian Ark) seem to be stunts, albeit masterful ones in those instances.
Reading that essay makes me feel like Bazin was just a tad breathless about the newly-rediscovered potential for eyepopping widescreen composition, and I do believe his statement that widescreen “has come along to definitively destroy montage as the key element in cinematic discourse” smacks of the Comic Book Guy-esque enthusiasm for the New Hot Thing, as if he said the same thing about 3D after seeing Avatar and Coraline. I don’t know any directors who respect the creative contributions of their editor a whole lot less than that of their cinematographer, and I find it hard to imagine that any would.
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Right now I’m familiarizing myself with the basics of silent film with the Lodger. There aren’t that many dialogue cards-- I suppose you fill in the missing dialogue by looking at facial expressions, which can only be read in closeup shots. Thus, the montage effect was created by using establishing shots, midshots, and closeups. On a large wide screen, facial expressions would be easily visible in a shot that simultaneously establishes the scene. I suppose pans and zooms would also be involved. But technical limitations of the early lenses didn’t help.
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I think the reason most people are okay with still images being in portrait mode is because still images are usually made with at least a modicum of attention. If nearly all still images made ended up looking like this:
Then it’d be easy to assume that vertical formats for portraits are as bad as they are for video.
I think the problem stems mainly from inattentive users who either don’t realize how much they’re chopping out of their video, or those who don’t realize that their video is unwatchable on anything other than a phone screen. If more than about 5% of vertical video shooters payed attention, and actually spend just a little effort on keeping things in frame, then vertical video could work just fine for some things.
As it stands, vertical video is generally a mark of laziness and usually has parts of the subject cropped out, or action relevant to the subject cropped out, which makes for an obnoxious format to use.
It’s like being played an interview, but only having the audio for one half of the conversation. If the director/producer/videographer was competent, they’d show us all the relevant parts, rather than just a small piece of it.
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Are you sure? Motion pictures essentially started at 4:3, got narrower (pillar-boxed) with the advent of sound when optical audio tracks ate up space at the side, got slightly wider with the advent of 1.375:1 Academy Ratio, then got a lot wider when movies went widescreen as a reaction to TV. In many ways the technical limitations of TV drove our preference for widescreen, which was perceived as better and more exclusive because of its association with movies. In the same way, 24 fps is seen as cinematic and desirable whereas 60 fps is derided as being soapy. Something similar could probably be said about shallow depth of field (the occasional Citizen-Kane-related paen to deep focus not withstanding).
Godard’s Le Mepris had Fritz Lang saying that widescreen (at least of the -scope variety) is only good for photographing snakes and funerals, so it’s not a given that widescreen is the best, most natural, or most effective way of capturing the world.
To a certain extent I think that the popularity of instagram has done a lot to bring square and oversquare images back into fashion, and and given them the sheen of desirability and sexiness they haven’t had for a long time.
I think it may use more than two aspect ratios. Welles’s Lady From Shanghai also uses multiple aspect ratios.
Then there are films that were shot open-gate 1.85:1 with an eye to 4:3 presentation, as many Kubrick movies were.
But why do you think that the horizontal nature of theatrical sets is a feature, and not a bug? Is theatrical makeup and voice projection something that should be emulated in movies?
Do theater patrons focus on multiple people simultaneously emoting on opposite sides of the stage? Or are they usually focused on individuals (or people close to one another)? With film you can position the camera and edit in such a way as to easily focus on the people you probably want to focus on in the theater.
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