Over the years, films changed from square flickering black and white images on a hastily hung screen to widescreen…
During the hot summer months, sometimes the best place to be is inside a cool, air conditioned movie theater enjoying a classic film.
Over the years, films changed from square flickering black and white images on a hastily hung screen to widescreen masterpieces rich in color and visual wonder.
The first CinemaScope movie, “The Robe,” premiered in September 1953, and its success changed the path of cinema. Widescreen films soon became the standard in Hollywood, as studios tried to lure viewers back into theaters and away from their television sets.
The artistic and technological evolution of widescreen film will be explored in “Eyes Wide Open: The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema,” a major eight-week survey running through Sept. 7 at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.
The series consists of 30 features and three short film works, including: Abel Gance’s 1927 masterpiece “Napoleon,” a precursor to widescreen cinema; the epic spectacles that defined the format (“Lawrence of Arabia,” “Grand Prix”), and films from a wide range of genres, including the western (“Forty Guns,” “The Wild Bunch”), science fiction (“Forbidden Planet”), international art film (“Pierrot le Fou,” “Contempt,” “High and Low”), musical (“West Side Story”) and avant-garde (“The Chelsea Girls”).
“The 1953 premiere of “The Robe” at the Roxy Theatre in New York City was hailed as a watershed to match that of “The Jazz Singer’s” introduction of sound,” said Peter Dowd, curator of film, who organized the series. “In the 50 years that followed, filmmakers around the world — from the Japanese New Wave to the American avant-garde — have boldly experimented with the form.”
CinemaScope was not the first widescreen format, but it was the first to be embraced by the industry. Just a year before “The Robe” opened, “This is Cinerama!” premiered in a process that linked three separate projected images side-by-side to create one enormous image. While it excited audiences and filmmakers alike with new creative possibilities and innovative stereophonic sound, Cinerama was expensive and technically cumbersome. Its popularity and commercial potential, however, sent studios scrambling for a way to make widescreen a reality.
Even earlier in 1920s France, Abel Gance made spectacular use of widescreen in the three-screen finale of “Napoleon,” expanding the projected image to match the film’s dramatic climax: “If people had followed my lead 30 years ago, the cinema would have evolved much more rapidly towards its new style,” he said.
At the same time, yet separately from Gance, a French inventor, Henri Chrétien, patented an anamorphic filming process that squeezed a wider image onto existing film stock. CinemaScope was adapted by 20th Century Fox from Chrétien’s 1927 invention, enabling them to make the widescreen format affordable to theater owners who had to expand their screens and buy anamorphic lenses, but could keep their existing projectors. Within a year, all of the major studios except Paramount had adopted CinemaScope.
While most early CinemaScope films were historical epics, maverick filmmakers soon explored new possibilities. In “Rebel Without a Cause,” screening on July 20, Nicholas Ray used dynamic widescreen compositions in domestic settings to articulate the intimate family drama. In “Forty Guns,” screening July 26, Samuel Fuller took familiar terrain — the western — and made it operatic.
Ray and Fuller’s experimentation inspired the emerging French New Wave, as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard embraced the widescreen canvas. At the same, Japanese masters Akira Kurosawa and Nagisa Oshima were likewise pushing the new format’s envelope. The avant-garde dived into widescreen with seminal works by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey.
Ironically, television, its success the catalyst for widescreen cinema, emulates the format with 16:9 screens. Of course, widescreen films still offer their most powerful experience in the movie house.
Friday, Aug. 1
7:30 p.m. “The 400 Blows”
France, 1959, 94 mins. Directed by Francois Truffaut. With Jean-Pierre Leaud. Leaud plays troubled Parisian youth Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s New Wave landmark, richly filmed in black-and-white Dyaliscope. This screening is also part of the Repertory Nights program.
Saturday, Aug. 2
2 p.m. “Jailhouse Rock”
MGM, 1957, 96 mins. Directed by Richard Thorpe. With Elvis Presley. CinemaScope offers an ideal frame for Presley’s performing prowess, especially during the show-stopping title song, which he choreographed.
4 p.m. “Some Came Running”
MGM, 1958, 137 mins. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. With Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine. Minnelli uses the breadth of widescreen compositions to evoke the ennui of a WWII veteran returning home in his haunting adaptation of the James Jones novel.
6:30 p.m. “The 400 Blows”
See above.
Sunday, Aug. 3
2 p.m. “Jailhouse Rock”
See above.
4 p.m. “The Hustler”
20th Century Fox, 1961, 134 mins. Directed by Robert Rossen. With Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott. The tale of the legendary Minnesota Fats was edited by Dede Allen, who artfully cut Eugene Shuftan’s Oscar-winning black-and-white images.
6:30 p.m. “The 400 Blows”
See above.
Saturday & Sunday, Aug. 9 & 10
70MM Weekend
2 p.m. “Lawrence of Arabia”
Columbia, 1962, 216 mins. 70mm Print. Directed by David Lean. With Peter O’Toole. Form and content are perfectly married by Lean in this epic masterpiece, which makes full use of the Panavision 70mm canvas-and of O’Toole’s star-making performance.
6:30 p.m. “The Wild Bunch”
Warner Bros., 1969, 145 mins. 70mm Print. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. With William Holden, Robert Ryan. Peckinpah uses widescreen composition, slow motion, and jarring editing to turn his violent tale of aging western gangsters into a cinematic ballet.
Friday, Aug. 15
7:30 p.m. “Pierrot Le Fou”
France/Italy, 1965, 110 mins. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. With Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina. Lovers on the run, Belmondo and Karina race to the south of France in Godard’s playful art-cinema classic. This screening is part of the Repertory Nights program.
Saturday, Aug. 16
2 p.m. “West Side Story”
United Artists, 1961, 151 mins. Directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. With Natalie Wood. Robbins’s choreography and Daniel Fapps’ cinematography create dazzling vistas in this contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” scored by Leonard Bernstein. New 35mm print.
4:45 p.m. “Point Blank”
MGM, 1967, 92 mins. Directed by John Boorman. With Lee Marvin. Boorman created a modernist film noir in his New Wave-inspired adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novel “The Hunter.” A steely Lee Marvin seeks vengeance in sun-drenched Los Angeles.
6:30 p.m. “Pierrot Le Fou”
See above.
Sunday, Aug. 17
1 p.m. “Kwaidan”
Japan, 1964, 164 mins. Directed by Masaki Kobayashi. With Takashi Shimura. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, Kobayashi’s visually sumptuous telling of four supernatural tales opens with a dazzling, abstract credit sequence.
4 p.m. “The Pornographers”
Japan, 1966, 128 mins. Directed by Shohei Imamura. With Shoichi Ozawa. From the opening flicker of an 8mm projector, Imamura’s extraordinary black comedy about the travails of a smalltime pornographer is a masterful study of voyeurism, photographed in black-and-white Nikkatsuscope.
6:30 p.m. “Pierrot Le Fou”
See above.
Saturday, Aug. 23
2 p.m. “Tokyo Olympiad”
Japan, 1965, 170 mins. Directed by Kon Ichikawa. Commissioned to film the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, Ichikawa delivered a poetic homage to athletes that is as artful and spectacular as Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.
Sunday, Aug. 24
2 p.m. “Grand Prix”
MGM, 1966, 179 mins. Directed by John Frankenheimer. With James Garner, Yves Montand. Working with visual consultant Saul Bass and production designer Richard Sylbert, Frankenheimer created a spectacle that pushes the cinematic envelope with multiplying split-screens that approach abstraction, and stunning Formula One racing sequences. Preceded by “Routemaster: Theatre of the Motor “(Germany, 2000, 16 mins. Directed by Ilppo Pohjola.) An experimental meditation on the sights and sounds of auto racing.
Friday, Aug. 29
7:30 p.m. “Once Upon a Time in the West”
Paramount, 1968, 165 mins. Directed by Sergio Leone. With Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards. The Techniscope cinematography of Tonino Delli Colli brings Leone’s masterful “dance of death” to life. This screening is part of the Repertory Nights program.
Saturday, Aug. 30
2 p.m. “The Chelsea Girls”
U.S., 1966, 210 mins. Directed by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. Projecting two 16mm frames side-by-side for their underground blockbuster, Warhol and Morrissey create a panorama of elliptical narratives within New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Preceded by “Inner and Outer Space” (U.S., 1965, 33 mins. Directed by Andy Warhol. With Edie Sedgwick.) Warhol’s first dual-projection work, an early multi-media experiment, presents Sedgwick confronting her own video double.
6:30 p.m. “Once Upon a Time in the West”
See above.
Sunday, Aug. 31
2 p.m. “Lisztomania”
Warner Bros., 1975, 104 mins. Directed by Ken Russell. With Roger Daltrey. Classical composer Franz Liszt is portrayed as the first rock star (and Ringo Starr plays the Pope) in Russell’s freewheeling extravaganza, a surreal spectacle of sight and sound.
4:30 p.m. “Flesh For Frankenstein” (3-D Presentation)
Bryanston Pictures, 1974, 95 mins. Directed by Paul Morrissey. With Joe Dallesandro, Udo Kier. Filming in “Space-Vision 3-D,” Morrissey creates an inspired horror send-up that balances the ridiculous and sublime while fully exploiting the suitability of 3-D for in-your-face effects.
6:30 p.m. “Once Upon a Time in the West”
See above.
Friday, Sept. 5
7:30 p.m. “Apocalypse Now Redux”
United Artists, 1979-2001, 202 mins. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. With Martin Sheen, Marlon brando. Coppola’s Vietnam epic, loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and filled with unforgettable sights and sounds, is expanded and restored in stunning Technicolor. This screening is part of the Repertory Nights program.
Saturday, Sept. 6
2 p.m. “THX 1138”
Warner Bros., 1971, 95 mins. Directed by George Lucas. With Robert Duvall. Expanding his prize-winning USC student film, Lucas directed, edited and co-wrote (with Walter Murch) his darkest film, a vision of a dystopic future in which love and sex have been outlawed.
4 p.m. “Manhattan”
United Artists, 1979, 96 mins. Directed by Woody Allen. With Allen, Diane Keaton. From its famous opening montage, Allen’s New York homage features Gordon Willis’s rapturous cinematography and elegant use of carefully choreographed long-take tableaus.
6:30 p.m.
“Once Upon a Time in the West”
See above.
Sunday, Sept. 7
2 p.m. “THX 1138”
See above.
4 p.m. “I Stand Alone”
France, 1998, 93 mins. Directed by Gaspar Noé. With Philippe Nahon. Like a nightmare version of This Is Cinerama!, Noé’s film about a troubled ex-con opens with a series of center-frame still images before exploding into a widescreen montage that announces the film’s themes-violence and voyeurism. Preceded by “Outer Space” (Austria, 1999, 10 mins. Directed by Peter Tscherkassky.) In his visceral avant-grade film, Tscherkassky explodes the frame, manipulating footage from Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity.
For more information call 718-784-0077 or go to www.movingimage.us.
