Ideas Count, Screens Don’t

Reading the informative article by Elaine Dutka on the retrospective of wide-screen films at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (“Focusing on the Big Picture With Wide-Screen Films,” Calendar, Feb. 28), I was struck by Sony executive Michael Schlesinger’s remark that “If you have two eyes, your range of vision is ‘wide-screen’--close one and it’s television.” While I would not disagree with Schlesinger’s assertion that “movies were . . . meant to be seen in theaters,” I think it possible to challenge the assumption that there is anything “natural” in wide-screen photography or that the elongated images are superior to the older ones.

As Turner Entertainment official Richard May points out in the same article, certain subjects lend themselves to a wide-screen format just as others do to a more traditional one. In retrospect, however, the adoption of wide-screen processes caused far more problems than it solved, many of which persist today.

From the beginnings of wide-screen photography in the ‘50s, economic rather than artistic considerations have usually dictated whether a film would be shot in wide-screen. As Dutka states, Fox introduced CinemaScope in the hope of “enticing people back into theaters”--not to provide directors or cinematographers with greater flexibility in composition. While the major studios used wide-screen processes like CinemaScope or Paramount’s VistaVision or the various 65/70-millimeter systems for their big productions, more tightly budgeted productions had to put up with an ersatz process or shoot in a traditional ratio.

The proliferation of wide-screen processes led to chaos in projection standards when exhibitors began to screen every picture, regardless of its original format, so that it would fill their CinemaScope-sized screens. This visual Tower of Babel--the image expanded beyond reason--caused a loss of distance between audience and picture: Before wide-screen projection, the modest-sized image, no amoeba-like tableau that threatened to engulf the audience at any moment, remained clearly demarcated from the surrounding space of the theater. The effect was to guarantee a degree of objectivity to movie viewing and thus create the basis for a collective experience of motion pictures.

In many wide-screen films the camera no longer served to mediate between viewers and the action, but plunged them right into it, a visceral aesthetic that reached its peak in Cinerama. Spurred on by the success of wide-screen productions, the movie industry increasingly concentrated upon supplying a literal experience of reality, culminating in the production of high-adrenaline pictures that have more in common with amusement park attractions than with film art. Movie viewing today has become for most people an experience that is atomistic and subjective rather than collective, the reflex of economic consumerism in the sphere of entertainment.

Finally, even assuming that wide-screen processes more resemble human vision than did the old format, why should a movie, any more than a painting, attempt to literally reproduce reality? Artistic vision is selective, not natural. Last summer, I had watched a few reels of the UCLA Film Archive’s 35-millimeter nitrate print of Josef von Sternberg’s “The Scarlet Empress” (1934). Although I had seen “The Scarlet Empress” before, I realized more than ever how much the film’s creation of a stylized world that exists purely on celluloid results from what would seem drawbacks today: black-and-white cinematography and the use of what Dutka calls “the ‘squarish’ ” old format. But Von Sternberg offered the audience something better than a reproduction of 18th century Russia--”re-creation and not a replica,” as he says in his autobiography, “Fun in a Chinese Laundry.”

At the end of Dutka’s article, Schlesinger quotes John Carpenter’s remark, “It’s ‘Scope that makes it a movie.” With all due respect to the director, shouldn’t it be intelligence and imagination--more than any technological innovation--that makes it a movie?