Letterboxed

The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema

Harper Cossar

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780813126517
• eBook ISBN: 9780813139968
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

When widescreen technology was introduced to filmmaking in 1953, it changed the visual framework and aesthetic qualities of cinema forever. Before widescreen, a director's vision for capturing beautiful landscapes or city skylines was limited by what could be included in the boxy confines of an Academy Ratio film frame. The introduction and subsequent evolution of widescreen technology has allowed directors to push the boundaries of filmmaking.

Letterboxed: The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema explores the technological changes of the widescreen technique and how the format has inspired directors and also sparked debates among film critics. Examining early filmmakers such as Buster Keaton and D. W. Griffith and genre pioneers like Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk, Harper Cossar explains how directors use wider aspect ratios to enhance their creative visions. Letterboxed tracks the history of stylistic experimentation with the film frame and demonstrates how the expansion of the screen has uncovered myriad creative possibilities for directors.

Chapter 1

D. W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Abel Gance, and the Precursors of Widescreen Aesthetics

The cinema at its material base is a technological form—one in which technological innovation precedes the aesthetic impulse (i.e., no artist can express him- or herself in cinema in ways which would exceed the technological capabilities of the machines).—David Cook (1990, 6)

It is through the limitations of an art that the master shows his true genius.

—Goethe (quoted in MacGowan 1957, 233)

A discussion of wide film aesthetics cannot begin in earnest without at least some acknowledgment of how widescreen aspect ratios in and of themselves are physical ruptures from the established norm of the Academy ratio. How did the Academy ratio become an established norm? Why wasn’t cinema a more horizontal medium from the beginning? Wouldn’t a flexible screen shape be more adaptable to a variety of genres and textual elements?¹ A brief historical survey of aspect ratios is warranted to pinpoint how engineers, filmmakers, and various other practitioners have wrestled with the Academy ratio proportions from cinema’s very beginnings.

The Academy ratio and 35mm film were standard formats for more than sixty years of cinematic history (1889–1952), with few deviations.² Both standards derived from W. K. L. Dickson’s decision to split the Eastman Transparent Film, a 70mm stock, in half to allow more economical experimentation with raw stock. John Belton concludes that by dividing the raw stock, Dickson (an assistant of Thomas Edison) doubled “the amount of footage he could obtain from each roll and, at the same time, avoid any waste” (1992, 19). Ironically, the Fox Film Corporation reversed this decision for product differentiation by not dividing its 70mm Grandeur film format in 1930 (the aesthetics of Grandeur are discussed in chapter 2). Rick Mitchell reports that Fox “chose 70mm for Grandeur because it was exactly twice the width of 35mm film and meant no wastage of stock for film manufacturers” (1987, 38). Although Dickson “never explained why 35mm film and the 4:3 aspect ratio were chosen as formats,” it can be hypothesized that Dickson, a still photography enthusiast, settled on these proportions for the aforementioned efficiency but also because the division of 70mm raw stock yielded dimensions that mimicked the “ratio of width to height in nineteenth-century photographs” (Belton 1992, 17). Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, and Ottomar Anschultz may have influenced Dickson’s aesthetic decision, but Auguste and Louis Lumiere’s adoption of the 4:3 proportions solidified the position of the 35mm standard for early cinematic texts.

One can imagine that Dickson’s experience in still photography and his father’s career as a “distinguished English painter” would have given the Edison protégé a predilection for what has been called the golden section (1.618:1) (Belton 1922, 43).³ Dickson, however, chose the 1.33:1 dimension because his employer no doubt encouraged him to value economic efficiency over classical notions of beauty. Additionally, Dickson’s initial experiments with moving images consisted of portraits and two or three shots, not landscapes. This speaks to the dearth of landscapes in the early Kinetoscope films (Belton 1992, 22).

One can surmise that even from cinema’s earliest exploits, the choice of imagery, framing, and mise-en-scène showed a certain bias toward vertical compositions rather than horizontal configurations. Ironically, after Dickson parted ways with Edison, he presumably also parted ways with the Academy ratio, because Dickson helped develop the Latham Eidoloscope, which produced an image of 2.33:1. Although the Eidoloscope (or Panoptikon) was ultimately unsuccessful in competing with Edison’s MPPC 35mm standard, film projection to hundreds of customers (rather than to individuals on Kinetoscopes) became the norm, and the Lathams “looked to wide-gauge film” to secure an image that did not degenerate fidelity when projected (as did the smaller Kinetoscope). Mitchell details the importance of aspect ratios with regard to theatrical projection by reminding us that “picture size was limited by the balcony overhang, which would cut the top of the screen off for those in the back of the first floor,” yet simultaneously, one had to produce “an acceptable picture in the last row of the top balcony” (1987, 37).

In this light, widescreen aspect ratios were always “latent” (as Charles Barr indicates) within the shape of the Academy ratio, but they needed technological ruptures, generic impulses, or auteurs to bring them to the fore. Some thirty years before widescreen’s adoption by the film industry, a select group of auteurs was using widescreen aesthetics to accentuate and strengthen narrational power within generic vehicles. In the history of cinema, few filmmakers elicit more reverence, controversy, and high-minded rhetoric than D. W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, and Abel Gance. These three vastly different auteurs are cited throughout film history as highly influential exemplars of sustained creativity and ingenuity. This chapter focuses on this silent-era trio in a new light—as precursors of and experimenters with wide film aesthetics. By pushing the bounds of stylistic norms, these auteurs use widescreen poetic “devices” to direct the viewer’s attention and broaden the impact of their epic or comedic generic tropes. As Kristin Thompson observes of the silent era, “not all of the many experiments that were tried in the early teens became part of Hollywood’s paradigm. Only those solutions which held promise to serve a specific type of narrative structure caught on and became widely used” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 157). These select auteurs sought to expand the stylistic possibilities of their chosen generic vehicles as a manifestation of their distinctive directorial signatures.

This articulation does not suppose or proffer a teleological progression from these filmmakers and their physical or stylistic hallmarks to their peers or even to the widescreen heyday of the 1950s. Rather, this chapter highlights a portion of aesthetic film history that is vastly underreported. Each of these three ballyhooed directors is regarded as displaying distinctive stylistic or narrative traits throughout his oeuvre. Through a textual analysis of aesthetic choices (close-ups, landscapes, angles, and camera movement) present in these silent-era texts, the existence of widescreen aesthetics in the form of physical or stylistic ruptures is revealed.

In Griffith’s films Broken Blossoms (1919) and Orphans of the Storm (1921), the director uses widescreen techniques such as masking (a physical rupture of the Academy ratio frame) to create a wider image rather than a vertical composition. These narratively unmotivated choices show that Griffith recognized possibilities implicit within the “inflexible” frame that had yet to be exploited. By deliberately seeking to elongate his composition, Griffith “ruptures” the filmic frame in ways previously untried by auteurs of his caliber.

Though Keaton does not mask his images to create lateral compositions the way Griffith does, he often relies on the long shot and resists cutting to show his gags in full—two techniques often considered hallmarks of the wide films of the 1950s. In addition to these stylistic ruptures, Keaton employs physical ruptures such as quadrant sets to produce an effect very much like that of split screen and the vibrant multi-image techniques of The Boston Strangler (1968) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). Keaton’s techniques are evident in both his short films such as The High Sign (1921) and his feature-length films such as Our Hospitality (1923).

Finally, one cannot discuss wide films and aesthetics without examining Gance’s bravura use of Polyvision triptych to close Napoleon (1927). As Kevin Brownlow (1983) suggests, Gance sought to “orchestrate” the filmic frame (or frames) in ways previously unrealized or, more likely, unimagined. Gance’s horizontalizing of the frames (to say nothing of the enlargement and multiplication of the viewable screens when projected) produces a physical rupture that predates the CinemaScope era by some twenty-five years. The orchestration of the trifurcated filmic frame suggests the director’s dissatisfaction with the “inflexible” proportions of the screen.

Throughout this chapter, three significant and narrow questions are proffered: (1) How do stylistic and physical ruptures occur within the rubric of close-ups, landscapes, angles, and camera movement? (2) What are the auteurist tendencies or benefits of utilizing ruptures in these cases? (3) How is genre relevant to the textual and technical decisions of the filmmakers, and how do such generic considerations influence visual style?

D. W. Griffith

The two Griffith films under consideration are both melodramas. Griffith’s association with the melodrama makes his use of the masking techniques discussed later even more salient. Griffith and cinematographer Billy Bitzer often experimented with iris and masking techniques to privilege certain areas of the frame over others. Brownlow describes how Griffith and Bitzer expanded the canon of filmic technique, writing that in practically all of Griffith’s “little stories … there was some experiment, however insignificant” (1968, 22). In Griffith’s films, I am interested in the use of landscape shots because in these momentary ruptures of widescreen-esque masking, Griffith and Bitzer are striving for what Barr calls some forty-four years later (referring to CinemaScope) a greater emphasis of space. This chapter is concerned with why Griffith and Bitzer “experiment” purposefully in both Broken Blossoms and Orphans of the Storm with physical ruptures of aspect ratio within the image.

Tom Gunning’s (1991) study of Griffith’s Biograph films from 1908 to 1909 examines the director’s understanding of the stage melodrama and its application or adaptation to the screen. In his discussion of Griffith’s visual style, Gunning seldom mentions the specific use of iris or masking shots as vehicles by which Griffith inscribes himself as narrator, but he does note that Griffith (in The Country Doctor) uses framing strategies to display the “juxtaposition of human form against the monumental form of nature” (235). Gunning’s attention to Griffith’s visual poetics is understandably anchored to the distribution of narrative information via editing techniques. This chapter builds on Gunning’s revelations by expanding Griffith’s tools within the “narrator system” to those of widescreen aesthetics and, specifically, the use of letterboxing masks. Using David Bordwell’s description of directorial “cues” that articulate the classical Hollywood cinema, Gunning details what is at stake in unearthing Griffith’s specific use of devices to tell a story, and how they point to an active narrator: “The narrative discourse of film involves a unique transaction between showing and telling. The photographic imagery clearly possesses a unique ability to show. But how do films pick up and indicate the significant elements within this detailed and contingent reality and endow them with a narrative meaning? What is it that tells the story in a narrative film? What are the marks within the film … by which the film conveys its story to the viewer?” (18). Certainly Gunning addresses many of Griffith’s “transactions” and defines “what tells the story in a narrative film.” Thus, by interrogating the narrator’s use of widescreen-esque devices, we may better understand how Griffith “endows” these devices with power and thereby exacerbates generic formulas via widescreen aesthetics.

Barry Salt (1992, 82) argues that Griffith’s “achievement lies … in the detailed way a piece of staging is invented and worked out” in such films as The Drive for a Life (1909) and The Girl and Her Trust (1912). Salt stops short of giving Griffith and Bitzer credit for inventing rupturing techniques such as the iris and the mask or matte, but he does acknowledge the team’s mastery of both. Salt identifies the mask or matte as an “opaque sheet of material placed in front of, or behind, a lens to obscure part of the image it forms” (326). Salt suggests that masking or matted shots were used as early as 1901 in As Seen Through a Telescope and again in 1902 with Peeping Tom. The author indicates that these masks were often used as representative points of view (POVs)—to imitate the look through a telescope (iris) or the view through a keyhole (keyhole-shaped mask). Therefore, the use of these devices in early cinema is one of mimicry and imitation; the purpose is not to strive for some greater or “more vivid sense of space” but rather to restrict where the eye can look within the frame. Quite the opposite notion is expressed by scholars such as Bazin and Barr commenting on widescreen techniques some forty years after these films were made.⁴ Such visual restrictions rupture what Sergei Eisenstein calls the “square frame” (the Academy ratio) by creating strange shapes within the frame that require a viewer’s redirection, not to mention a sort of cognitive interplay to ascertain what such a device’s presence signifies.

More specifically, what are we to make of these horizontal mask shots in Broken Blossoms and Orphans of the Storm? Are these physical ruptures simply momentary visual experiments that Bitzer “resisted as being against tradition” (Brownlow 1968, 22)? In his examination of Griffith’s films, Scott Simmon asks, “What can be rediscovered to admire in Griffith’s work? The answer would have to run something like this: his skill at developing and, to an extent, inventing the grammar of the cinema, and in particular, his mastery of tempo of parallel montage, as most spectacularly displayed in the intercutting of close-ups shots” (1993, 16). Griffith’s goal was to maximize narrative distribution through melodramatic generic structures. Why would he choose to spectacularize (via a physical rupture) the visual frame in the two films under consideration? How do melodramatic tropes factor into these directorial decisions? To fully understand the consequences of such queries, a fuller examination of early melodramatic codes is apropos.

In Melodrama and Modernity, Ben Singer defines melodrama as “a set of subgenres that remain close to the heart and hearth and emphasize a register of heightened emotionalism and sentimentality” (2001, 37). Singer acknowledges that a specific definition of how these “tear-drenched dramas” operate depends on the critic’s point of entry. Although the definition of melodrama can be nebulous and difficult to pin down, Singer announces that a primary and unwavering component of melodrama is “a certain ‘overwrought’ or ‘exaggerated’ quality summed up by the term excess” (39). Melodramatic excesses can be legion; the textual qualities can be excessively wrought with visual style (as discussed in the work of Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk in chapter 3), and melodrama can “activate various … visceral responses” from the spectator (39). Singer builds the argument of what qualities culminate to constitute a melodramatic text by citing Lea Jacobs’s idea of “situation.” Situations within melodramas are “striking and exciting incident(s) that momentarily arrest narrative action while the characters encounter a powerful new circumstance and the audience relishes the heightened dramatic tension” (41). Singer readily acquiesces that “situations” as a defining trope of melodrama are “very broad and malleable” and are difficult to distinguish in relative terms of intensity; nevertheless, the concept of “situation” is a useful lens by which to examine melodrama (42).

If melodramas can be defined by excessive situations that use stylistic means to exaggerate the emotional state of “characters on the verge of hysteria and collapse” or to embellish “a truly evil villain that victimizes a(n) innocent, purely g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction “Snakes and Funerals”
• Chapter 1 D. W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Abel Gance, and the Precursors of Widescreen Aesthetics
• Chapter 2 The Big Trail, The Bat Whispers, and the “Invention” of Widescreen Style in 1930
• Chapter 3 Emerging Stylistic Norms in CinemaScope: Genre and Authorship in the Films of Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Frank Tashlin, and Douglas Sirk
• Chapter 4 Experiments, 1968, and the Fractured Screen
• Chapter 5 New Media, Digitextuality, and Widescreen
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index