{"id":13750,"date":"2011-12-09T23:02:24","date_gmt":"2011-12-09T23:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=13750"},"modified":"2011-12-11T19:11:36","modified_gmt":"2011-12-11T19:11:36","slug":"in-praise-of-widescreen-cinemascope-aspect-ratio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2011\/12\/09\/in-praise-of-widescreen-cinemascope-aspect-ratio\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of Widescreen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Almost every film we see now is in widescreen<\/a>, but how did this look come about?<\/p>\n

With the proliferation of widescreen television<\/a> over the last decade, it is sometimes easy to forget that until relatively recently films were cropped for home viewing.<\/p>\n

This meant that for a lot of movies, a large percentage of the rectangular image (in the aspect ratios of 2:35 and 1:85) was removed so it could fit the squarer aspect of television (the 1:33 or 4:3 ratio).<\/p>\n

The roots of this are historical, as the advent of television in the 1950s forced Hollywood to come up with newer ways of enticing audiences back to cinemas.<\/p>\n

Thus modern widescreen processes were invented to put an image on screen that couldn’t be replicated in the homes of the time.<\/p>\n

This shifted the fundamental look of films from the traditional academy ratio of 1:33 to the more rectangular widescreen look we now take for granted.<\/p>\n

But when it came to screening those movies on television (ironically the very medium that triggered widescreen developments) there was the obvious problem of converting that wide image on to a square TV screen.<\/p>\n

Here Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese (and others) explain for TCM<\/a> the whole business of ‘pan and scanning’ and why it was bad for certain movies (by the way, Curtis Hanson’s example of The Last Supper<\/a> painting is pure genius):<\/p>\n