Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 2, January 2002
André Bazin
Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry? (1953)
Everybody knows by now, even the
average moviegoer, that Hollywood is trying to come to terms
with one of the most severe economic crises in its history
through the introduction of both 3-D, whose avant-garde
stereoscopy has already been seen on French screens, and
CinemaScope, whose big war machine, _The Robe_, has already
been shown in New York and is soon going to be exhibited in
Europe. [1] Everybody knows, too, that Hollywood is
forced to accept the risks of such an endeavor -- which
totally upsets the norms not only of production, but also of
distribution -- in view of the acute competition represented
by television. At least everybody thinks he knows these
things, for the details of the problem are not that simple.
The aim of this article, then, is precisely to try to create
some order out of all this. Let's start with some interesting
facts of a very general nature. First, we can observe that
this time the crisis is not turning into chaos or panic. To
be sure, great confusion still reigns, and one can see the
'major companies' taking the most contradictory measures;
each one has its own strategy -- or claims it has, for it is
very often the same strategy under a different name. While
some big companies almost completely ceased production only
a few months ago, one can see a minor company like Monogram
double its annual schedule for the production of B-movies
for normal screens. Clearly, the heyday of Hollywood is
over. But, again, this confusion and decline have not become
panic and hysteria, at least not yet. By investing totally
in CinemaScope, Fox is not repeating Warner Brothers' gamble
with talkies. None of the American companies, in spite of a
film-consumption crisis that has become worse and worse over
the last five years, are yet on the verge of bankruptcy.
They can probably all afford to indulge in a long period of
Malthusianism [2] without being threatened with
extinction. This means, of course, that the technical
experiment [3] will be relatively controlled and
that Hollywood will probably be able to draw some
conclusions as soon as the moviegoing wind starts blowing
one way or another. The situation will probably be more
serious for the unemployed technicians and actors. But it is
not that alarming, and it won't get worse for at least a few
months, because television needs a lot of small films that
can be quickly made and in which there is work for many
people. Some stars go over to television; others make the
most of their forced holidays and come to Europe to act in a
co-production over an eighteen-month period, thus avoiding
the paying of income tax -- which is well worth the
corresponding loss of Hollywood salary. To cut a long story
short, the situation could become very disquieting five or
six months from now, but perhaps we will be able to see it
more clearly then and work will resume, if at a different
pace. These remarks are not aimed at
minimizing the importance of the crisis -- on the contrary,
since it would be impossible to do so in the face of the
numerical figures that I'll give later -- but only at
defining its atmosphere and above all at underscoring the
fact that Hollywood is still in control. It is important to
know this especially for those who naïvely believe in
some huge crash, in Hollywood's sinking into an economic
chaos from which Europeans could benefit. Hollywood won't
cast its 'three dice' like a desperate gambler. On the
contrary, its operation will continue to be mounted with
caution and firmness, and that operation will be massively
supported by the various publicity departments. The
reservations Hollywood has about responding to the challenge
of television will be overcome thanks to the temporary
financial advantages gained by the attractive transformation
of movie screens, for example -- thanks, that is, to all the
assets of a powerful, conscious, and organized
capitalism. Of course, this doesn't mean that all
the obstacles -- and we'll see that they are numerous --
will be removed. But at least they will be dealt with, with
maximum efficiency, in Europe as well as in America, and I
don't really see how the American experiment could fail even
if the old Continent resists the new developments. The film
revolution will be universal or it won't take place at all.
Whether we like it or not, Hollywood remains the magnetic
pole of the film industry, at least as far as technical
proficiency is concerned. We can particularly see it today:
Cinerama, [4] which is little more than Abel Gance's
triple screen, and CinemaScope, [5] which was
invented twenty-five years ago by Professor Chrétien,
seem viable all of a sudden because of the interest that
America has shown in them now that the moviemaking business
is in decline. Such a situation seems to lead to a
pessimistic view of the notion of progress in the cinema. I
will no doubt have to clarify this aspect of the matter, but
only after I've attempted to analyze its sociological and
aesthetic aspects. Let's stick with the economic side of
things for the moment, and briefly recall the causes and
proportions of a crisis whose seriousness cannot be denied.
The immediate cause is the dramatic reduction of the number
of moviegoers since the introduction of television. In the
last five or six years, the American film industry has lost
approximately half of its national audience; this has meant
the closing down of five thousand movie theaters (all of
France doesn't have that many), and will mean the bankruptcy
in the near future of several thousand others. The
simultaneity of the onset of the crisis and of the rise of
television naturally doesn't permit any doubt that
television is indeed the principal factor in the crisis.
Unfortunately, one cannot say that it is the only
one. From various bits of evidence, one can
conclude that the twenty million American television sets
have simply crystallized and accelerated a tendency in the
moviegoing audience. Indeed, this tendency started to
manifest itself even in areas where television had not yet
been introduced, and it has continued to get worse and worse
in the areas saturated with television sets. Furthermore, we
know that in various European countries, particularly
France, where the number of television sets is still
insignificant, a disturbing reduction in the number of
moviegoers has been observed in the last few years.
Everything, then, seems to indicate that a general, deep,
and *a priori* weariness with the cinema on the part of the
American public has found in television a visible means of
manifesting itself. The viewer statistics are therefore all
the more alarming, and they indicate that the haemorrhage
cannot be checked through a mere cauterization -- a
CinemaScoping, as it were -- of the wound made by television
to the film industry. By instinct -- an instinct that is
deep-rooted and that isn't without value, even from an
aesthetic point of view, as we'll see later -- Hollywood
understood that the defense against television had to be of
a *spectacular* nature. Let's not forget, at the same time,
that the evolution of film (even in America) has been toward
the interiorization of the *mise en scène* at the
expense of spectacle. Moreover, the conditions of the market
demanded such a reduction of spectacle as much as the laws
of aesthetic evolution. The remaking of _The Birth of a
Nation_ with the latest cinematic technology would be
unthinkable today because the film could no longer pay off
(the success of _Gone with the Wind_ was miraculous, and the
industry is careful not to try to repeat it). Today, Cecil
B. DeMille's Biblical epics (e.g. _Samson and Delilah_) are
made on ridiculously low budgets compared to his similar
productions of thirty years ago (e.g. _The King of Kings_).
Nowadays, we must go to Russia (and perhaps India) to find a
film with an enormous crowd of walk-ons, or a movie that is
produced regardless of cost. And yet . . . it is obvious that film
owns a lasting superiority over television precisely because
of its spectacular resources -- indeed, only because of
them. Lasting, because the television picture will in all
probability remain limited in definition by the 625 scanning
lines of the standard American set (just as the
cinematographic film is limited by its 35 millimeters, a
figure arbitrarily chosen by Edison). Whatever its other
technical qualities (including color and 3-D, which will one
day be available), the television picture will always retain
its mediocre legibility. It will also remain a product
essentially consumed in the family circle, and, as such, it
will continue to be limited to a small screen. In any case,
a big television screen for collective viewing in movie
theaters makes some sense only for live news programs; but
the quality of the image of such 'telecinema' would be very
inferior to that of cinema itself. So it is logical that the
counteroffensive of the film industry is being fought on its
home turf, in the area of its only superiority: through a
return to its potential for the spectacular. To tell the truth, Hollywood has not
chosen its strategy by deduction. Indeed, the impetus came
from a New York film attraction whose success has taken on
colossal and unforeseeable proportions: Cinerama. After two
years of continuous running, seats still have to be booked
six months in advance. You know what Cinerama is: the
juxtaposition, on a huge, curved support, of three screens
upon which three aspects of a single image are
simultaneously projected. Abel Gance had done the same thing
twenty-five years earlier in _Napoléon_, and in
addition had used every possible combination of images on
the three screens in order to create sensational effects in
the editing of space. This is also the principle behind
panoramic photography. In any event, the effectiveness of
the device is not to be measured in terms of its technical
originality, for all those who have seen Cinerama agree that
it is quite impressive. But the use of Cinerama does not come
without problems that are almost impossible to solve. This
wide-screen process demands a theater of the appropriate
size and shape, three projectors and three projection rooms,
and last but not least a very delicate electronic
synchronization of the three projectors. The result is not
always perfect, even when all the conditions for Cinerama's
use have otherwise been met. In the film industry, however,
the fundamental question concerning technological
developments remains the following: how are they going to
complicate distribution? Thus a device such as Roux-color,
[6] which is amazingly simple and cheap, does not
stand a chance for the simple reason that it complicates the
projection of the film. It will always be wiser and more
profitable to invest millions of dollars in laboratories
that perfect film processes than to provide owners of movie
theaters with flawed prints or prints that cannot be
flawlessly projected. Hence the enormous superiority of
CinemaScope over Cinerama. Thanks to the anamorphosis of the
image permitted by Professor Chrétien's lens, the
triple picture of Cinerama finds itself literally compressed
to the dimensions of a standard film. A symmetrical lens
then expands the image during projection. In fact, the image
that is thus expanded is only about two and a half times the
length of a conventional screen, but the experiment reveals
that such a length -- as opposed to that required for
Cineramic projection -- is absolutely sufficient for maximum
effectiveness. Of course, CinemaScope itself is going to
complicate rather seriously the issue of distribution. It is
easy to comprehend that this wide-screen process demands an
appropriate setting. The long and narrow movie theaters do
not have a back wall that is wide enough for a CinemaScope
screen. In France, for example, the number of theaters that
*won't* have to be transformed is estimated at only twenty
percent. Moreover, the CinemaScope equipment, temporarily
monopolized by Fox, is rather expensive. Indeed, aside from
the special projection lens, a special screen with high and
uniform luminosity from all angles is necessary. Consequently, these serious, if not
insurmountable, difficulties have already become the pretext
for the appearance of a surrogate CinemaScope, which crudely
attempts to solve all problems. Today, for instance, one can
see in Paris (and all the other capitals of Europe) a
'panoramic screen', which is a rather strange kind of
swindle. Its advantage is double: first, the size of the
screen is variable within limits that make it adaptable to
most normal movie theaters; second, and above all, it
transforms any type of standard film into a 'wide-screen'
one. It is worth explaining through what wonderful geometric
slight of hand the 'panoramic screen' does this. It's a
simple question of fractions: the conventional image is
defined by its 4:3 x 2 proportions (I'm rounding off in
order to simplify), i.e. 8:3. But in every school, one
learns that one can also multiply a fraction by dividing its
denominator, which means that, instead of doubling the
length of the image, I can *divide it into two lengthwise*:
hence, 8:3 = 4:1.5. This half picture, projected with an
appropriate lens, will cover an area of screen that is
exactly identical with the area covered by CinemaScope, and
the trick is done. I'm not joking: the very official,
very serious, and oh-so-very wise 'Technical Commission of
the French Film Industry' recommends to all producers that
from now on they make their films for potential projection
on a panoramic screen, i.e. that they concentrate the
'useful' part of the image in the central portion of the
frame. The projector of the appropriately equipped movie
theater will be fitted with a mask of the same proportions
as the screen, and this mask will hide the 'useless' part of
the image. As matters stand today, since not all films have
been made to undergo this surgical operation, the framing is
left to the initiative of the projectionist, who is supposed
to choose between beheading the characters and cutting off
their legs, according to his personal complexes. But already
the most serious of filmmakers have come to compose their
images in such a way that they can undergo, without too much
damage, the removal of one sixth off the top and one sixth
from the bottom. More stupid even than the catoblepas,
[7] film is eating both its head and its tail, but
only, of course, in order to grow larger. What difference is there, then,
between the wide screen and the standard, abbreviated one?
Isn't the viewer's angle of vision the same? Perhaps, but
here we must specify more what CinemaScope in fact is. The
optics of cinema is defined not only by the proportions of
the image, but also by what one can introduce into the
frame. Unlike the eye, which has a single optical system,
the camera has at its disposal a wide variety of lenses
covering more or less unlimited angles. In the case of wide
angles, the use of short focal lengths partly compensates
for the narrowness of the screen. This system has its
drawbacks, though, for the more one moves away from the
physical properties of the eye, the more obvious are the
distortions in perspective. The indisputable advantage of
Professor Chrétien's Hypergonar [8] is its
multiplication by two of the angle of its specially
developed lens, without modifying the lens's other optical
characteristics. What happens when the image is projected
onto a wide screen, then, is not only that the viewer's
angle of vision gets widened -- an angle, moreover, that
depends on where he is seated in the theater -- but also
that the depth of his perception of photographed reality is
genuinely increased. By way of comparison, imagine that I
have cut a flat rectangular window into a piece of
cardboard, and that I have placed behind the frame thus
defined a photograph that must come into contact with the
cardboard. The angle formed by my eye and the sides of the
picture varies with the distance at which I place the
cardboard, but the image itself does not vary: it is still
defined by the optical nature of this particular viewing.
Let me now remove the photograph and consider as a 'picture'
what I see behind the 'mask' of the cardboard. This time,
whether I step back or get closer to the frame will indeed
make a difference, for the true angle of vision really
increases together with that of the triangle whose upper
corner is my eye and whose base is the length of the 'mask'.
It is this angle of view that matters first and foremost,
before the one formed by the screen and my chair. In
substituting for CinemaScope, the 'panoramic screen' widens
the latter angle only by making the picture shrink
vertically. The true content of the image, then, is divided
by two (relative to the conventional image as defined by its
4:3 proportions) or by four, if we compare it with the
CinemaScopic picture. Thanks to this sad example of the
'panoramic screen', one can see what purely commercial
vicissitudes the evolution of cinema must undergo. This
leads me to a meditation on what the notion of progress in
film thereby becomes. Of course, in all the arts progress
depends on the development of technique or technology. We
know what the evolution of painting owes to the discovery of
perspective, on the one hand, and to the invention of
siccatives, on the other. However, one couldn't say that the
history of harmony is totally dependent upon the history of
musical instruments, and one well understands that, since
the discovery of the grinding of powders in oil, the art of
painting on an easel has evolved independently of any
technical or technological innovation. Conversely, it is
true that, at least roughly speaking, the evolution of
architecture is determined almost completely by the
materials used, or in any event by the hypothetical control
one is able to achieve over them. Thus the Romanesque and
Gothic cathedrals are built with the same stones, but the
architect of the latter has arranged them in a far more
efficient way. Must we therefore contrast the
evolution of the so-called 'abstract' arts, such as music or
literature, with that of the so-called 'concrete' arts, in
which the materials are predominant? Probably not, for in
both cases the aesthetician would discern a logic, a system
of laws, inherent in each art form, and would define, at
least *a posteriori*, the possible evolutions and
involutions of that form. The quarrels among architects are
not essentially different from those between traditionalist
and twelve-tone musicians. In these fields, it is the mind
that ultimately makes artistic decisions. Its decisions may
later be altered or even misrepresented by the constraints
of history, but the evolution of the art, even if it is
thwarted, will still retain a theoretical integrity and a
definable sense. There are some who would say that this
is not true for film as well. However, if we examine the
history of cinema, we are permitted to doubt whether the
artist's critical sensibility and will matter so little in
its destiny. Certainly, film has had no shortage of
creators, even creators of genius, who have contributed
considerably to its progress: this is as irrefutable for the
cinema as it is for the traditional arts. We need not be
shocked by the fact that these filmic artists generally
bowed to the demands of mass consumption. Such constraints
also make for the greatness of film, and it has derived from
them some excellent aesthetic benefits. Although these
constraints are perhaps more numerous and heavy than
anywhere else, essentially they still don't represent a
condition peculiar to, and restrictive of, filmmaking. But
normal aesthetic progress in the cinema is difficult, for
this art form is at the mercy of technological disturbances
that may interrupt its course for purely economic
reasons. Thus silent film had reached an
admirable point in its evolution when sound came along to
challenge everything. It is obvious that not a single
filmmaker had asked for this technological innovation, not
even the ones whose personal style could only have benefited
from it. The producers, and the producers alone, were
responsible for the creation of this new attraction. In
fact, talking pictures had already been possible for a
number of years, and we would have had to wait several more
years for the implementation of sound had the financial
problems of Warner Bros not prompted this studio to gamble
everything on the new discovery. It is not at all absurd to
imagine that, if the introduction of sound had been
conducted in a slightly different way and had not been
successful with the viewers, films would have remained
silent. Indeed, it is always the initial response that
determines the destiny of important changes in the processes
of production and distribution. In 1927, Abel Gance made a
film to be shown on a wide triple screen (_Napoléon_)
and Claude Autant-Lara made another one with
Chrétien's Hypergonar (_To Build a Fire_).
[9] But the conditions under which these films were
projected and the general industry context (attention was
already focusing on the talkies) caused this potential
revolution to fail at the time. The only difference today
resides in the fact that a long and well-orchestrated
publicity campaign, together with enormous financial
reserves, may prime the commercial pump and determine the
success of an endeavor that had failed twenty-five years
earlier. Conversely, a filmmaker couldn't
possibly cause, through the sole power of his art, any kind
of disturbance in the technological framework within which
filmmaking is carried on. Of course, he can benefit
tremendously from technological progress (the sensitivity of
emulsions, the outfitting of the studios, etc.), but he
never determines it. Let's go one step further. Not only do
the external or technological conditions of filmmaking
exclude the filmmaker, but also the destiny of cinema as an
art form does as well. No doubt, what fundamentally
distinguishes the mechanical arts that have appeared since
the 19th century from the traditional arts is the mortality
of the former. The danger that television represents for the
film industry is not at all like the threat that film had
presented to theater. Although, at the very worst, a
reduction in the number of theatergoers might force the
theater to switch to more unusual or more modest dramatic
forms, the disappearance of theater as an art form is
unthinkable: it will necessarily and eternally be reborn in
children's games, in social liturgies, or simply in the need
that some people have to playact in front of their peers, be
it only in the catacombs. The traditional arts were born at
the same time as man and will disappear only if he does. In
this respect, film is not an art form, it is not the
fulfilment of an eternal need or a newly created one (are
there any radically new needs?); rather, it is the result of
the happy conjunction between a virtual need and the
technological-economic state of civilization. In other
words, film is not an *art* AND *an industry*, but instead
an *industrial art* that is likely to vanish into thin air
as soon as the industry's profits disappear. So if tomorrow
television robs the film industry of the portion of its
audience that was still making it a profitable exercise,
producers will invest their capital elsewhere and the cinema
will vanish from the scene as quickly as it came onto the
scene. And nothing will persuade me to believe, in the
spirit of futuristic optimism, that television will take
over from an aesthetic point of view, just as film has taken
over (at least partially) from the novel and the theater.
For, aside from the fact that television is an industrial
form in whose evolution aesthetic logic plays only a very
small part, the art of television is probably much narrower
than that of film. It is superior to film only in the field
of documentary reportage. For the rest, television is a
means of communication and expression that is irremediably
cruder than the cinema. So, unlike the traditional arts, which
can merely decline or suffer, film in principle is mortal.
And it's better to know from the start if one truly cares
about its continued existence. I myself have underlined the
danger to film's survival only to reaffirm my faith in its
future. Up to now, the threat to the cinema has concerned
only Hollywood, although, of course no one would think of
taking any pleasure from that. Even if we did, Hollywood
remains, in all senses of the word, the capital of world
cinema. I won't go so far as to say that filmmaking would be
crippled without Hollywood, but it *would* lack an essential
gland whose secretions influence all other glands.
Nonetheless, film would survive and would probably end up by
compensating for the loss of its American capital. Certainly
television is going to develop in Europe as it did in
America, but nothing proves that French, English, or Italian
viewers will so persuasively fall under its sway as the
Americans have. One conceivable strategy for the
cinema's survival would be a greater differentiation on the
part of producers between the market for cheap B-movies and
the market for *reasonably cheap* quality movies. The former
would continue to be made for, say, fifty percent of today's
filmgoers, while the latter would be aimed at precisely that
international fringe of the audience capable of escaping the
grip of television in order to go and see a good film. In
fact, there is a certain audience that goes to the theater
and the movies alike solely on the basis of the quality of
the play or film presented. To be sure, this group of people
is relatively small, but, on an international scale, it may
be big enough to ensure the financial viability of the films
that we like, such as those of Renoir, Rossellini, Bresson,
and De Sica. One may also hope that television will later
help the film industry by playing the role of a distribution
network, for whose products customers will have to pay and
which will be a source of additional income, beyond the
profits made by the movie theaters themselves. More still: not only does the death of
the film industry seem improbable to me, but also the
attempt to solve its economic crisis through spectacular
developments seems to point in the direction of substantial
and desirable evolutionary progress. It is significant that
this industrial art form, which is dependent upon economic
factors, should have had its aesthetic progress ensured
exclusively by technological developments. That is, if one
can really speak about progress in the arts, for, in a way,
it will always be absurd to think of da Vinci's work as
superior to the art of the caveman. From this point of view,
progress never depends on material technique or technology,
or, more accurately, each technique has its own evolution
whose peak is as high as that of the technique, or the
technology, which replaces it. There does tend to be
agreement, however, that from murals to oil painting one can
indeed see progress, as one can from the epic to the novel
or from melody to counterpoint. My purpose is not to defend
this thesis, which I think the reader will easily accept if
only he considers the opposite one. Refusing the evolution
of technique or technology amounts to condemning the life of
civilization itself, to refusing to be *modern* -- i.e. to
refusing to exist. It remains true that not all
technical-technological developments are *ipso facto*
evidence of progress: they must in the end be brought into
harmony with the internal laws of the art form, with its
specific physiology. Thus, conversely, modern art strives to
return (even if through some very sophisticated techniques
or technology) to fundamental or primitive laws that have
been buried under the brush of a false, or falsely prized,
historical evolution: see Lurçat [10] and
tapestry, for example, or Le Corbusier and
architecture. So I won't say that sound, by itself
and through the mere fact that it added one element to the
picture, has meant progress for film. If this is indeed so,
it is because film is not at all in essence an art form of
exclusively visual images. It is paradoxically true that its
initial infirmity, by forcing filmmakers to create a silent
language, contributed to the evolution of an art form that,
as early as 1925, had already reached a kind of classical
stage; it is equally true that speech challenged this
language of silence and caused the temporary regression of
cinema. But these accidents do nothing to controvert the
fact that the essence of film from the very start (one might
even say as early as its seed took root in the inventors'
imagination) has been a quest for the realism of the image.
One could say that this realism is implied by the automatic
genesis of the cinematographic image, and that it aims at
giving this image the greatest number of characteristics in
common with natural perception. The abstraction that is necessary to
art must paradoxically emerge here from what is most
concrete in the image. Every convention that film retains
from drawing, painting, and photography (black and white,
the absence of a third dimension, framing itself)
contributes to its abstraction, if only temporarily. The
worst mistake we could make, however, is to think that these
'genes', by their very existence, are exquisite and fecund.
One must temper such a belief, which is too general to be
true. It would be equally naïve to think that the
filmic image tends toward total identification with the
universe that it copies, through the successive addition of
supplementary properties from that universe. Perception, on
the part of the artist as well as the audience of art, is a
synthesis -- an artificial process -- each of whose elements
acts on all the others. And, for example, it is not true
that color, in the way that we are able to reproduce it --
as an addition to the image framed by the narrow window of
the screen -- is an aspect of pure realism. On the contrary,
color brings with it a whole set of new conventions that,
all things considered, may make film look more like a
painting than reality. The same holds true for stereoscopic
relief, which does indeed give the impression that objects
exist in space, but in a ghastly or impalpable state. The
internal contradiction of this relief is that it creates the
impression of an unreal, unapproachable world far more than
does the flatness of black-and-white film. This is why one
shouldn't count on a victory for stereoscopic relief in the
war among 3-D processes. Even if we forget about the
inconvenience caused by Polaroid glasses, the unreality of
this universe, which seems strangely spun out of a hole on
the screen, would be enough to condemn it -- except in the
genres where the aim is precisely a certain union of fantasy
and reality, especially horror films. It is nevertheless
possible that, with the advent of the wide screen, one of
the major disadvantages of stereoscopic relief will
disappear, and certain films, detective stories and musicals
in particular, will be shot with this photographic
process. In any event, the real revolutionary
innovation will very probably be the CinemaScopic screen,
and from now on we must take account of it. Let me say right
away that the equation of this screen with stereoscopic
relief is incorrect and the result of overzealous publicity.
It must also be said that, after a few yards, binocular
vision plays only a secondary role in the perception of
depth, and that the location of objects in space is the
result of a series of factors which could as well be taken
in by a one-eyed viewer. The closer the conditions of filmic
vision get to natural vision, then, the more the dimension
of depth will appear; and, in this respect, the CinemaScopic
screen helps in that it gives us, instead of today's narrow
window, a widened surface whose angle formed with the
viewer's eye is closer to the normal angle of vision. But
the impression of depth and perspective cannot be
manufactured in all CinemaScopic shots and, even when it is
created, it remains rather partial. The genuine contribution
of CinemaScope lies elsewhere: in the elongated format of
its screen. Up to now, the only items I have seen
in CinemaScope (in Paris or in Venice) are spectaculars, of
either a documentary or a dramatic nature (_The Robe_, for
example), all of which employed this new method of framing.
Its effect is undoubtedly sensational, especially when
combined with stereophonic sound, which is required on
account of the huge dimensions of the screen. We can well
understand why Clouzot is furious that he made _The Wages of
Fear_ (1953) before the appearance of CinemaScope, since the
film would have benefited 100 percent from it. CinemaScope
has an affinity as well with genres like the Western, whose
signature framing is the long shot showing the landscape
stretching toward the horizon. The cavalry marches, the
stagecoach chases, and the Indian wars will at last find on
the wide screen the space where they belong. But one can
make some very serious arguments against CinemaScope,
despite its partial advantages. What film is going to gain
from it in the spectacular genres, isn't it going to lose in
the area of psychological complexity and, more generally, in
the power of its intellectual expression, precisely the
qualities on which the more sophisticated genres depend?
Furthermore, what's going to become of the sacrosanct
close-up, the keystone of film editing, through this bay
window that is being substituted for the old, narrow
one? That's the operative word here:
*editing*. Ever since the filmic work of Abel Gance and
Sergei Eisenstein, on the one hand, and a famous critical
article by André Malraux, on the other hand, it has
undoubtedly become the alpha of cinematic language, the
omega being framing, which plastically organizes the
contents of the image. Well, we must once and for all get
rid of this critical prejudice, which in any case has been
shown to be untrue by a number of silent masterpieces, such
as those of von Stroheim and Chaplin, in which editing plays
only a secondary role. It is not true that cutting into
shots and augmenting those shots with a whole range of
optical effects are the necessary and fundamental elements
of filmic expression, however subtle that expression might
otherwise be. On the contrary, one can see that the
evolution of film in the last fifteen years has tended
toward the elimination of editing. Already before the war,
we had Jean Renoir's great lesson on this subject.
[11] And we have had lessons since then from
_Citizen Kane_ and from _The Best Years of Our Lives_, in
which most of the shots are exactly as long as the scenes
taking place in them. It is true that framing alone can
often create within the image a kind of virtual editing. But
isn't this fact of composition itself about to disappear, in
that it is a plastic artifice foreign to the essence of the
*mise en scène*? Bresson's _Diary of a Country
Priest_ (1951) owes very little to photographic composition,
and I can see in it very few optical effects that are not
translatable into CinemaScope. But I do see the additional
meaning that the opposition, or rather the place, of the
priest in the landscape in some shots would gain from
filming in CinemaScope. A motion picture like _The River_,
of whose innovative beauty I have sung the praises in
_Esprit_, could also only profit from presentation on a wide
screen. I'm still waiting for someone to give me the title
of a single film -- at least in recent years, and one whose
import is not aesthetically reactionary -- that couldn't
have been shot in CinemaScope. And I won't accept _Othello_,
whose purpose seems to me to be the final exhaustion of
montage in a flurry of artifice. In contrast to Welles's Shakespearean
film, the wide screen will only hasten the adoption of that
most modern of tendencies beloved in fine filmmaking: the
stripping away of everything extrinsic to the quintessential
meaning of the image, of all the expressionism of time and
space. Film will thus grow even more apart from the
abstractions of music and painting, and will get even nearer
to it profound vocation, which is to show before it
expresses, or, more accurately, to express through the
evidence of the real. Put yet another way: the cinema's
ultimate aim should be not so much to mean as to
reveal. Translated by Bert Cardullo University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
Missouri, USA This article first appeared in French
in _Esprit_, vol. 21 no. 207-208, October-November 1953, pp.
672-683. Translated here, for the first time, with the
permission of Madame Janine Bazin. Translator's Footnotes 1. _The Robe_ was the first film shot
in CinemaScope; it opened at New York's Roxy Theatre in
September of 1953. 2. A reference to Thomas R. Malthus
(1766-1834), the English economist who theorized that
population tends to increase at a faster rate than its means
of subsistence and that, unless it is checked by moral
restraint or by disease, famine, war, or other disaster,
widespread poverty and degradation inevitably
result. 3. With 3-D films, as well as with
CinemaScope, Cinerama, Panavision, and other wide-screen
processes. 4. Cinerama. A wide-screen process
originally utilizing three cameras and three projectors to
record and project a single image. The three 35mm cameras
were set up to record three aspects of a single image
simultaneously: one camera facing directly ahead and the
other two slightly to the right and left. When projected on
a special huge screen, curved to an angle of about 165
degrees, at twenty-six frames per second, the images blended
together to produce an illusion of vastness and plasticity.
Three electronically synchronized projectors were used, the
middle one projecting straight ahead and the other two
projecting to the right and left in a crisscross
arrangement. Developed by Fred Waller of
Paramount's special effects department, the system was first
introduced at New York's 1939 World's Fair as Vitarama, and
at that time the process involved eleven projectors. In 1952
the improved and simplified process described above made its
sensational public bow in New York with _This Is Cinerama_,
a thrill-filled travelogue type of film, which featured a
roller-coaster ride, a plane flight over the Grand Canyon,
and several other spectacular scenes. Other episodic
Cinerama films followed until 1962, when the first story
feature in the process, _How the West Was Won_ (directed by
Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall), was
released. Although commercially successful, Cinerama left
much to be desired technically. The three images did not
always match properly, causing an irritatingly jarring
effect where the images joined. As a result, the three-lens
system was abandoned and a single-lens, 70mm process,
similar to other current wide-screen processes except for
its curved screen, was adopted. Multiple camera-projector systems date
back to 1896, when the French inventor Raoul Grimoin-Sanson
used ten projectors to show a panoramic picture on a huge
circular screen. He called the process Cinerama. Director
Abel Gance used a triple-panel screen to project his 1927
Napoléon. He called his system Polyvision. Following
the exploitation of Cinerama, other processes were
attempted, including Cinemiracle, Thrillerama, Wonderama,
Disney's Circarama, Quadravision, and the technically
inferior Soviet system, Kinopanorama. 5. CinemaScope. Trade name copyrighted
by Twentieth Century Fox for a wide-screen process based on
an Anamorphic system developed by Professor Henri
Chrétien. The system involves special lenses that
compress and distort images during filmmaking and spread
them out undistorted during projection, over an area wider
than the normal motion-picture screen. In theory the
anamorphic effect has been known since the 1860s. Several
anamorphic processes have been patented since 1898. The most
successful of these was developed and demonstrated by
Chrétien late in the 1920s. The French director
Claude Autant-Lara experimented with Chrétien's
invention on several short documentaries, but it seemed to
have no commercial value and was soon shelved. In the
frantic search by Hollywood studios early in the 1950s for
wide-screen systems to counter the threat of television,
Twentieth Century Fox took an option on Chrétien's
invention and named it CinemaScope. The commercial success
of _The Robe_ led to the adoption of the system by other
major studios and to the rise of rival anamorphic systems,
including WarnerScope, TechniScope, PanaScope, and the
versatile SuperScope and Panavision. The CinemaScope image,
photographed on normal 35mm film, is about two and a half
times as wide as it is high when it is projected, and has an
aspect ratio of 2.35:1, as compared with the conventional
screen aspect ratio of 1.33:1. The aspect ratio for 70mm
CinemaScope is 2.2:1. 6. Named after Lucien Roux
(1894-1956), who with his brother Armand invented this color
process in 1931. It can be seen at work in Marcel Pagnol's
_La Belle Meunière_. 7. An unknown, perhaps mythical,
African quadraped that has been identified with the
gnu. 8. The original name for the
anamorphic lens systems developed by Henri Chrétien
and later developed into CinemaScope by Twentieth Century
Fox. 9. In 1927, Autant-Lara tackled a
wide-screen experiment with the short _Construire un feu_,
an avant-garde adaptation of a Jack London story. 10. Jean Lurçat (1892-1966) was
a French painter who greatly contributed to reviving the art
of tapestry. 11. Bazin could be referring here
either to _La Grande Illusion_ (1937) or _La Règle du
jeu_ (1939). Filmography _La Belle Meunière_ (_The
Lovely Mistress of the Mill_), Marcel Pagnol,
1948. _The Best Years of Our Lives_, William
Wyler, 1946. _The Birth of a Nation_, D. W.
Griffith, 1915. _Citizen Kane_, Orson Welles,
1941. _Construire un feu_, Claude
Autant-Lara, 1927. _Diary of a Country Priest_, Robert
Bresson, 1951. _Gone with the Wind_, Victor Fleming,
1939. _La Grande Illusion_, Jean Renoir,
1937. _How the West Was Won_, Henry
Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall, 1962 _The King of Kings_, Cecil B. DeMille,
1927. _Napoléon_, Abel Gance,
1927. _Othello_, Orson Welles,
1952. _La Règle du jeu_, Jean Renoir,
1939. _The River_, Jean Renoir,
1951. _The Robe_, Henry Koster,
1953. _Samson and Delilah_, Cecil B.
DeMille, 1949. _To Build a Fire_, Claude Autant-Lara,
1927. _The Wages of Fear_, Henri-Georges
Clouzot, 1953. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2002 André Bazin, 'Will CinemaScope
Save the Film Industry?' (1953), _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6
no. 2, January 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n2bazin>.
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