The Shape of the Frame

For about twenty years the shape of a film image was settled. The Academy ratio, roughly 1.37 to 1, slightly wider than a square, standardised in 1932 once sound needed room on the strip. Every film you can think of from the 1930s and 1940s is that shape, and the composition of the period, the staging, the close-ups, the way groups are arranged, is built for it.

Then television arrived with a screen of almost exactly the same proportions.

That is the whole explanation for widescreen. Not an artistic discovery: a competitive problem. Cinema needed to offer something the box in the living room physically could not, and the one thing a cinema can always do is be bigger and a different shape.

Twentieth Century Fox launched CinemaScope in 1953 with The Robe. The technique was clever and cheap, which is why it spread. An anamorphic lens on the camera squeezes a wide field of view horizontally onto a standard 35mm frame. A matching lens on the projector stretches it back out. No new film stock, no new cameras from scratch, no rebuilt laboratories: a cinema needed a lens and a wider screen.

The initial ratio was around 2.55 to 1, close to twice the width of Academy. It settled nearer 2.35 once optical sound was added back for theatres that could not handle the magnetic tracks, and the modern standard is 2.39. Studios that did not license the process used flat widescreen instead, cropping and hard-matting to 1.66, 1.75 or 1.85, which is where the most common ratio of the last fifty years comes from.

What the wide frame did to the craft is the interesting part.

A very wide frame is awkward for a single face and natural for two or more people. Which means a dialogue scene can be played in one shot, with both actors visible, held, without cutting. The early reaction was that this made films static, and the directors who took it seriously found the opposite: a held two-shot lets the audience choose where to look, lets a reaction happen in the corner of the frame while somebody speaks in the centre, and lets a performance play continuously rather than in fragments assembled afterwards.

That is in genuine tension with what the Kuleshov lesson in this subject describes. Editing creates meaning by controlling what the audience can see and when. A wide held shot gives that control back. Both are real techniques, and a director choosing one is giving up what the other provides, which is a more interesting choice than either technique's advocates usually admit.

Then television got the films anyway, and ruined them.

Pan and scan is the process of fitting a wide image onto a narrow screen by choosing which part of each shot to keep, and moving that choice during a shot. A composition with two people at opposite edges becomes a single of one of them, or a lurching sideways drift between them that nobody shot. Characters present in a scene vanish from it. Framings designed to place somebody at the edge of the picture, isolated, become framings where they are not in the picture at all.

Letterboxing, which keeps the whole frame and puts black bars above and below, was resisted for years on the grounds that audiences would object to the wasted screen. Widescreen televisions eventually made the argument irrelevant, which means the problem lasted exactly as long as the mismatch did, about forty-five years.