The crucifixion scene from The Robe it made a disturbing impression on my five-year-old self - and has still has not been surpassed in my opinion. Over the ensuing years, Cinerama would spawn a host of ‘widescreen’ systems with very ‘wide’ sounding names CinemaScope, SuperScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO, Panavision, etc etc., and it’s this type of film that we will be concerned with here.ĬinemaScope even used to have its own title card in the credits – this spectacular one is from Seven Brides For Seven Brothers.įor me, it all began back in the mid 1950s, when one of our local cinemas closed for a few days to have something called ‘CinemaScope’ installed (I’d actually been taken to a neighbouring town see The Robe a couple of years earlier and the term ‘CinemaScope’ hadn’t registered in my five-year-old conciousness at that time – only the stereophonic sound, during the crucifixion scene, that I found deeply unnerving but by 1955 I was a cinema veteran, and could sit through anything). The curved screen effect is replicated by the Smilebox computer programme for the restored Blu-ray release.Ĭinerama pushed the aspect ratio out to 2.76:1, almost the entire field of view for the human eye, and onto an all-encompassing, deeply curved screen, accompanied by a powerful multi-track surround sound system. The super-wide and deeply curved Cinerama screen puts the audience right in the picture - and almost in the water! This is how it looked to amazed 1952 audiences. However, with the debut – on September 30th 1952 – of a revolutionary new system called Cinerama, this was about to change. This almost square shape was what people had long been accustomed to seeing when they went to the cinema. Prior to 1952 films were normally projected with an aspect ratio – the relation of a screen’s width to its height – of 1.33:1. Welcome to the online version of Wide Screen Movies Magazine, a site dedicated to those movies that have been shot and presented in one of the many and varied wide screen formats that have come and gone over the years.
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