Letterboxed: The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema, and: Widescreen Worldwide (review)

Two recent books, Letterboxed: The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema by Harper Cossar and Widescreen Worldwide, edited by John Belton, Sheldon Hall, and Steve Neale, propose to expand the scope of widescreen scholarship, which has until now tended to focus on the development and salient aesthetic characterizations of CinemaScope and its major competitors. Among the questions both works pose: What is the institutional history of widescreen and large-format exhibition in the United States but also abroad? How has widescreen technology affected filmmaking practices? What cultural significance and influence has widescreen exerted? Is there such a thing as a widescreen poetics?

Choosing to focus on the formal aesthetic analysis of widescreen, Cossar asserts that the move away from the 1.37:1 Academy frame may be understood as a "rupture" in classical Hollywood's formal paradigm and that it should be possible to uncover "what widescreen aesthetics are" (24) by describing the ways directors and cinematographers functionalized the use of the horizontal frame. Cossar demonstrates that wide aspect ratios have long corresponded with an orientation toward landscapes (versus portraits), long takes, and the segmentation of the frame, along with other, more specific adaptations depending on genre and auteur. Drawing from widescreen critic Charles Barr's claim that widescreen compositions were "latent" even in prewidescreen films, Cossar begins by describing three silent antecedents to the widescreen aesthetic: D. W. Griffith's occasional use of "letterbox-like mattes" for melodramatic effect in Broken Blossoms (1919) and Orphans of the Storm (1921), the long-take aesthetic of Buster Keaton comedies, and especially the truly widescreen Polyvision sequence at the conclusion of Abel Gance's epic Napoléon (1927) (unfortunately, Cossar's only non-Hollywood example).

He then provides three chapter-length analyses of widescreen cinema's formal tendencies. Especially demonstrative is the first chapter, which spells out the formal differences between the 35 mm and 2.10:1 70 mm Grandeur versions of the landscape-conscious western The Big Trail (1930) and also between the standard and 65 mm Magnifilm versions of the haunted house horror The Bat Whispers (1930). This is followed by a chapter comparing and contrasting auteurist patterns of "close-ups, landscapes, camera angles, and movement" (98) in four genre films of the fifties (River of No Return [Preminger, 1954], Bigger Than Life [Ray, 1956], The Girl Can't Help It [Tashlin, 1956], and The Tarnished Angels [Sirk, 1957]). Here, his individual film analyses are compelling, though additional widescreen examples by the same directors could have better supported his argument.

A third chapter of analysis concerns the "not yet normalized" (224) aesthetic of the multi-image panel thrillers The Boston Strangler (1968) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), which together represent a formal extension (or, one might say, exaggeration) of widescreen's tendency to segment the frame in the service of a new form of psychological cinema. Drawing parallels between multiple panels and multiple "windows," Cossar concludes with a brief consideration of new tendencies in "widescreen" composition associated with new media "digitexts." In the end, Cossar provides a very good argument for reviving interest in widescreen aesthetics. However, one may still be left questioning "what widescreen aesthetics are," because Letterboxed tends to focus on experimental, nonnormative, or auteurist uses of widescreen rather than explore its full range of more normative uses.

Widescreen Worldwide, which represents something of a grand summit on the topic of widescreen, complements Cossar's work by providing additional, comprehensive chapters of aesthetic analysis alongside chapters of industrial historical analysis, the effect of which is to foreground in the reader's mind a notion that widescreen is not so much a scrutinizable form of its own but rather a cluster-concept functioning within a variety of industrial, technological, aesthetic, and cultural histories. Eight of the twelve essays in the collection focus on Hollywood products, while two describe...