Widescreen Worldwide edited by John Belton, Sheldon Hall, and Steve Neale (review)

This book consists of twelve selected articles presented at a conference to mark the 50^th anniversary of widescreen cinema—suggesting that it took place in 2002—at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (now the National Media Museum) in Bradford, England. They focus on the “aesthetics of widescreen filmmaking, while situating those aesthetics within the larger cultural and industrial practices that inform them.” Furthermore, the book “considers these practices in a global context” and thus offers “the opportunity to examine how different cultures appropriate the technology to advance extremely different cultural and aesthetic agendas” (4). The scholars represented here include several of the most distinguished and widely published in the field. Building on earlier work, they also make use of recent advances in film studies. In this volume, “widescreen” means first and foremost anamorphic processes—CinemaScope and its imitators—but there are a few exceptions to that generalization.

As in the case of nearly any collection drawn from a conference, the range of topics is diverse. John Belton, who authored a seminal 1992 monograph on widescreen cinema, here contributes an article on a 50mm process developed by the Fox studio in the early 1930s and intended to be compatible with existing equipment and theatrical set-ups. Though not used at the time, it helped the company to deal with the challenge posed by Cinerama twenty years later, ultimately generating CinemaScope. Tom Vincent writes about VistaVision, a system that sought to improve on standard 35mm by means of height rather than width, achieving remarkable clarity of image in the process. Ironically, its very flexibility was also the cause of its demise. As Vincent notes, “The effective lack of stringent standards [VistaVision did not have a fixed aspect ratio or require special equipment] meant that it would always be difficult for VistaVision to become a standard in itself (37). The most recently developed large-format system covered in the book is IMAX. Paul McDonald examines how this traditionally independent entity, with its own production and distribution outlets, began to collaborate with mainstream Hollywood studios while still maintaining a separate identity. Lisa Dombrowski shows how CinemaScope technology quickly spread to lower-budgeted, black-and-white features (compared with the lavish color productions for which the widescreen process originally was intended) and gave directors of these “B” films the chance to add visual flair to their work. Two of the articles take an auteur approach. John Gibbs and Douglas Dye explore the uses of widescreen cinema by Otto Preminger and Sam Peckinpah, while Steve Neale does the same for Anthony Mann, focusing on the footage he shot for Spartacus before Kirk Douglas replaced him with Stanley Kubrick. In the two years following the debut of CinemaScope in 1953, non-anamorphic or “flat” versions of many of the features produced in that format were released, most for foreign or non-commercial exhibition, although some also played in U.S. theatres. Sheldon Hall examines a small number of films to show how the alternative versions were actually made. The process could involve positioning two cameras side by side to record the same scene simultaneously or shooting the same scene successively with different cameras, set-ups, and even staging. Hall finds that no one production method was used in the making of the twin versions, and there is little uniformity among them. For Kathrina Glitre, CinemaScope was the perfect technology to showcase the abundance and consumerism of the postwar era, especially in a string of romantic comedies that sometimes slyly undermined the materialistic values they appeared to celebrate.

The last section of the book explores aspects of the overseas impact of widescreen technology. Viewing the situation in Britain, Steve Chibnall concludes that even though anamorphic films accounted for well under twenty percent of total output in the five years following the introduction of CinemaScope, more ambitious filmmakers embraced the technology as a way...