It's Cinerama!
Jan. 1st, 2010 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI just spent the last week at my parents’ house, eating my Mom’s cooking, reading, knitting, and watching old movies. If any of you haven’t seen Buster Keaton’s The General, rent it now. I am serious.
We also watched How the West Was Won, which came out in 1962 and stars every-goddamn-body. It’s made up of five half-hour segments, following the lives of one family through the 1800s, and linked by prophetic narration about manifest destiny that will make any twenty-first century liberal’s teeth hurt.
It is also filmed in Cinerama. Cinerama was the precursor to IMAX, and the first truly immersive movie experience. It was filmed with three cameras linked through one bulbous lens and spanning about 180 degrees. The images were then projected onto an enormous semi-circular screen, so it filled your peripheral vision.
On a DVD, they preserve the original aspect ratio, which means the movie is a thin band across the screen. It also means that there’s no such thing as a closeup, since the actors are always dwarfed by the screen. In fact, on my parents' tv, I couldn’t even recognize people from one scene to the next unless they had a distinctive voice. (Hello, Jimmy Stewart. Playing a trapper who’s "practically an Indian." I’m sorry, Jimmy Stewart? Couldn’t sound more Yankee if he tried.)
But most disturbingliy--each of the three separate cameras has separate distortion across it. Which means that as someone walks across the screen, they bulge outwards as they cross from one camera to the next, then shrink back down, then bulge out again. It is really disturbing to watch. And each of the cameras has its own perspective, so you’re looking at a screen with three separate vanishing points.
One of the hallmarks of Cinerama, which before this did only travelogues, was putting the camera in a bomber and flying over landscapes and under bridges. These sequences, on the smalll screen, is really eye-crossing. You spend most of the movie distracted by the distortion, especially since every half hour there’s an enormous set piece that must have looked great in Cinerama and just looks really freakin’ weird on DVD.
I’m not the only one who thought the Cinerama distracted from the movie. How the West Was Won was the only dramatic movie filmed in Cinerama. It was a huge financial success, but it was a nightmare to film in, since everything is in the shot. You have to light 180 degrees and mic it, and anyone off-screen has to be so far away, they have to shout their lines at the person on camera, making filming conversations a problem. Because of the distortion, actors couldn't look directly at each other. They had to look to the side so the sight lines would look right. More difficult were the stunts, since they couldn’t use the normal rigs without them being visible on screen. In fact, one of the stuntmen was badly mutilated and almost killed during the filming. After that it was pretty much abandoned as a technology.
So, well, now I’ve kind of seen Cinerama. I’ll just call that expanding my cultural education.
We also watched How the West Was Won, which came out in 1962 and stars every-goddamn-body. It’s made up of five half-hour segments, following the lives of one family through the 1800s, and linked by prophetic narration about manifest destiny that will make any twenty-first century liberal’s teeth hurt.
It is also filmed in Cinerama. Cinerama was the precursor to IMAX, and the first truly immersive movie experience. It was filmed with three cameras linked through one bulbous lens and spanning about 180 degrees. The images were then projected onto an enormous semi-circular screen, so it filled your peripheral vision.
On a DVD, they preserve the original aspect ratio, which means the movie is a thin band across the screen. It also means that there’s no such thing as a closeup, since the actors are always dwarfed by the screen. In fact, on my parents' tv, I couldn’t even recognize people from one scene to the next unless they had a distinctive voice. (Hello, Jimmy Stewart. Playing a trapper who’s "practically an Indian." I’m sorry, Jimmy Stewart? Couldn’t sound more Yankee if he tried.)
But most disturbingliy--each of the three separate cameras has separate distortion across it. Which means that as someone walks across the screen, they bulge outwards as they cross from one camera to the next, then shrink back down, then bulge out again. It is really disturbing to watch. And each of the cameras has its own perspective, so you’re looking at a screen with three separate vanishing points.
One of the hallmarks of Cinerama, which before this did only travelogues, was putting the camera in a bomber and flying over landscapes and under bridges. These sequences, on the smalll screen, is really eye-crossing. You spend most of the movie distracted by the distortion, especially since every half hour there’s an enormous set piece that must have looked great in Cinerama and just looks really freakin’ weird on DVD.
I’m not the only one who thought the Cinerama distracted from the movie. How the West Was Won was the only dramatic movie filmed in Cinerama. It was a huge financial success, but it was a nightmare to film in, since everything is in the shot. You have to light 180 degrees and mic it, and anyone off-screen has to be so far away, they have to shout their lines at the person on camera, making filming conversations a problem. Because of the distortion, actors couldn't look directly at each other. They had to look to the side so the sight lines would look right. More difficult were the stunts, since they couldn’t use the normal rigs without them being visible on screen. In fact, one of the stuntmen was badly mutilated and almost killed during the filming. After that it was pretty much abandoned as a technology.
So, well, now I’ve kind of seen Cinerama. I’ll just call that expanding my cultural education.