Post-war screens and the widescreen phenomenon

The most obvious threat to cinema after the Second World War was television, which was often blamed for stealing audiences away from the big screen. However, in the post-war period, television was not the only factor in declining cinema audiences, and a whole range of other reasons for this decline have been suggested by a variety of authors. Some of the most important include the general shift from a public-centred to a more home-centred approach to life in Europe and the United States. In the United States in particular, it seems, people ‘began to spend more and more time and money in home-related activities, ranging from gardening and outdoor barbecuing to do-it-yourself home improvement and repair,’ and while there were some 8,000 television sets in the United States in 1946, this figure shot up to 34.9 million in 1956! (Belton 73). This coincided with increased home ownership and movement from the city to the suburbs, related decreases in the availability of public transport, and increased spending on home comforts and commodity goods – especially with the emergence of a group called “teenagers,” and of domestic appliances including vacuum cleaners and refrigerators.

Whatever the actual causes of declining audience numbers, from the mid-1950s, ‘cinema exhibitors sought to distinguish the silver screen from the television screen as a plethora of technical advancements were marketed, such as stereophonic sound and special widescreen formats’ (Hanson 117). And, whatever the technical and social elements and motivations of these changes, the shift to widescreen projection was likely one of the most obvious changes to the look of cinema in its short history. The 1950s is therefore one of the best documented periods of projection screen history, although again more attention is available about the new projection technologies than on those more directly related to the screens themselves.

Impressive projection screen projects, including a balloon

While most experiments and advances in widescreen technology took place in and following the 1950s, inventors dabbled with widescreen ideas and technology from the early days of cinema. One of the most impressive early attempts to work with a truly wide screen dates back to 1900, when Raoul Grimion-Samson presented his Cinéorama at the Paris Exposition: Using ten projectors, and with his audience in a balloon basket suspended above them, Grimion-Sampson projected hand-coloured film taken from a balloon on a 30 metre high, 300 metre circumference panoramic screen!

At the same Exposition, the Lumières exhibited a giant screen, with images projected to spectators on all sides of a screen that was some 400 metres square, and apparently sprayed with water during the screenings. As Kittler elaborates: ‘The Lumières typically employed front projection… which has since become standard practice,’ but here ‘they experimented with front and back projection at the same time,’ enabling half the audience to watch the film projected from the front while the other half saw the same film projected from the back – all this because the ‘screen was first submerged in water before every showing’(Kittler 164)!

Even earlier, in the mid-1890s, the Lathams’ Eidoloscope used a wide aspect ratio, and Biograph had produced films in 70mm, but by 1904 had given in to the commercial prowess of Eastman and Edison who used 35mm stock. Still experiments persisted, and in 1927 Abel Gance shot Napoleon in three-camera Polyvision with three projection screen panels offering separate montages as well as a combined widescreen effect, while Fred Waller’s Vitarama – a precursor to Cinerama – debuted at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. In fact, as Rick Mitchell notes in his article on the history of widescreen formats in American Cinematographer, a number of films were made and screened in wide format decades before Cinerama, CinemaScope and Todd-AO, but very few people – even “film buffs” – seem to be aware of this. Mitchell opens his article with the example of The Big Trail, a film directed by Raoul Walsh in 1930 and shown in 70mm at theatres in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago at that time.

Querying why it is that the standard was ever 1.33:1 in the first place – as ‘the wide aspect ratio seems natural for motion pictures’ (36) – Mitchell shows how economics forced a reconsideration of the standard in the United States well before the best-known widescreen formats emerged in the 1950s. One key problem was that along with the building of picture palaces, it soon became clear that ‘[i]n order to provide an acceptable picture in the last row of the top balcony, the size of the projected picture had to be increased’ – which stretched technical limits – while this increase was ‘also limited by the balcony overhang, which would cut the top of the screen off for those in the back of the first floor’ (37). What really brought matters to a head, though, was the emergence of optical sound, where the use of optical tracks along the side of the frame ‘shaved the existing aspect ratio to 1.22:1, which projected as less than a square, especially in theaters with steep angles of projection’ (Mitchell 37).

Fox Film Corporation took the initiative in looking into wider screens in the late 1920s, and writers including John Belton and Rick Mitchell have pieced together information from publications dating from 1927 about its attempts to develop a monopolistic widescreen system called Grandeur. Other systems started to emerge, too, including a 63mm system called Natural Vision, and a 60mm system named WideScope.

While the pressure to change the aspect ratio came from exhibition rather than production, it’s perhaps unsurprising to learn that ‘[i]ndependent exhibitors objected to the cost of installing new projection equipment and screens on the heels of paying for sound installations and lamented that such processes were really only benefit to the big first run houses in the major cities’ since first run houses generally belonged to large production companies who’d cover the costs, and 35mm versions would normally only be made available after the wide versions had finished their run (Mitchell 38). (An answer to the problems of small-screened theatres was suggested later, but not properly developed until the early 1960s when Techniscope was created by Technicolour Paris – which combined halving the frame size with anamorphic squeeze, resulting in ‘an economical wide screen image compatible with CinemaScope’ (Ibid.).)

In 1930, however, the Hays Office stepped in and stopped much of the inventive work going on at the time, and various commercial pressures also came to bear. Additionally, none of the wide aspect ratio films produced in the United States at this time appear to have been exported, nor does it seem that similar experimentation was taking place in Europe. As a result, although experimentation continued in the United States, no real progress was made with widening aspect ratio before the 1950s. And once again, the changes in the 1950s were motivated not by producers but by the fact that film audience numbers were in drastic decline in the post-war period, and those in the film and entertainment industry were desperate for means to entice them back.

The rise of commercial cinemas and big projection screens

Cinerama, the widescreen system created by Fred Waller, premiered in the United States in September 1952 with a screening of the independently produced This is Cinerama – a sort of crazed travelogue of images from Europe, cut with shots of Niagra Falls.

The Cinerama system, with its extremely wide angle of view, aimed to achieve an image similar to that seen by the human eye, and great claims are made for it. Certainly at the time, ‘the response of the public and the press was unprecedented. Both audiences and critics raved about the new process’ (Belton 103). It is often claimed, even now, that its huge, deeply curved wide screen was a spectacular new phenomenon, like nothing ever seen before. Such claims, though, seem a little excessive: While Cinerama clearly had a huge impact in 1952 and spawned widescreen systems and ideas that are still with us today, it’s equally clear from looking back on the history of screens that many people had previously shown that cinema need not be restricted to using the 1.33:1 aspect ratio and projecting onto flat rectangular screens.

What Cinerama did, though, was to bring these fantastic ideas into the mainstream, to make the industry consider changing the standard to work with more visionary projection and larger screens. If nothing else, the enormous success of This is Cinerama – which ‘ran for more than 122 weeks and grossed over $4.7 million in its initial New York run alone’ (Belton 113-114) – encouraged Cinerama’s competitors to come up with commercially viable widescreen systems of their own.

In 1953, CinemaScope was premiered by Twentieth Century Fox – a system that compressed a wide-angle view onto normal 35mm film using anamorphic lenses, and then re-expanded the picture by projecting it onto the screen through special lenses. Then, in 1955, the American Optical Company launched Todd-AO, a 70mm film process. Into the late 1950s and 1960s, other widescreen processes and systems were developed – including Panavision and MGM’s Camera 65 – and ultimately, Imax was developed in Canada and demonstrated in 1970 at the Exposition in Osaka. Imax is of course still with us today, as is CinemaScope – unlike most widescreen processes.

A da-lite advertisement from those days, thanks to nesster: www.flickr.com/photos/nesster/

Crucial to successful projection of widescreen systems, from their earliest years, was more light – simply because the arc lamp of a standard projector needed to light a larger screen area. In the mid-1950s, according to Belton, 3-D and widescreen systems ‘encountered similar problems in screen illumination, either because of light loss due to intervening Polaroid filters and glasses, or because of decreased aperture size due to masking coupled with an increased screen area in need of illumination’ (148). The development of a more highly reflective screen fabric was the answer to this problem, and this had already been the subject of experiments in 1928-30, when a German firm called Siemens Halske had used aluminium foil to back an embossed screen. ‘Basing its research on this technology, Fox developed a curved screen consisting of a special cotton fabric embossed with thousands of “tiny concave mirror-like elements” which directed the reflected light only into the actual seating area of the theater’ (Ibid.). Fox called the screens it developed using this approach “Miracle Mirror” screens, and a screen of this spec or similar had to be installed by exhibitors who initially wanted to screen Fox’s CinemaScope productions. The screens, though, cost something like four times as much as regular screens, and often theatres needed in addition to carry out major architectural renovations to their cinemas to provide a sufficiently wide space for the installations. Costs of this sort made spending on CinemaScope lenses seems like a bargain in comparison!

As well as the expense, consider the following difficulties reported with widescreen installations and you’ll have some idea of how tricky it was to bring widescreen entertainment to the public in the 1950s: Theatre installations of this type ‘sometimes suffered from moiré (shaped patterns put on them during manufacture which were often visible from certain angles in the cinema); seam visibility when sections were badly sewn together; lack of tautness when the laces connecting the individual sections loosened; and panelling (the effect of vertical bars produced by the joining together of darker and lighter strips of screen material’ (Belton 149). In addition, the deeply curved shape screens often used for widescreen system projection caused its own problems. First, Distortion had to be addressed by inventive use of wide-angle lenses and other means – for instance, Todd-AO’s ‘ingenious’ method of compensating for such distortion in the printing process, ‘by introducing optical distortions into the projection prints’ (Belton 170-171). Second, the curve caused light to reflect from each end of the screen onto the opposite edge, which resulted in washed out images. The louvered screen of Cinerama prevented this, and Todd-AO’s ‘specially designed lenticular screen… performed a similar function’ (Belton 170), its ‘plastic-coated fabric with an aluminium surface embossed in a formation of lenticles, or tiny lenses… [preventing] the surface from reflecting light back on itself at the extremities’ (Motion Picture Daily 7 October 1955, p. 16, cited Belton 170).

Clearly, then, the advent of widescreens and, later, gigantic Imax screens raised a host of new challenges for screen manufacturers, who had to re-think and re-apply all they knew about screen sizes, surfaces, coatings and shapes. However, it is clear that these manufacturers were up to such challenges, as evidenced by the remarkable and ever-evolving evidence of successful screen making! In addition, companies such as THX have strict requirements before they will certify public screens, for instance insisting that ‘the placement of the cinema screen is precisely calculated for every THX Certified Cinema,’ and the clear recommendation of a 36 degree viewing angle from the farthest seat in the auditorium. Further, THX advises designers and architects how best to accommodate these requirements, and ‘to make sure that every seat has an unobstructed view, THX often recommends either elevating or lowering the entire floor to adjust the seating location’ (http://www.thx.com/professional/cinema-certification/thx-certified-cinema-screen-placement/).

The early and ongoing development of solutions to problems such as those I’ve mentioned, and the research of companies involved in providing surround sound as well as high spec screens for our pubic and home cinema experiences, provides today’s manufacturers with a wealth of information about what problems to expect from different screen locations and materials. This of course better equips them to nip problems in the bud, or avoid them arising at all when developing screens for our homes, as well as for a variety of different theatres.

Continue to the next era in projection screen history: the rise of multiplexes and home cinema