Today we jumped into one of our favourite topics — the overuse of super a super-wide frame, i.e. cinemascope, in contemporary movies. The Hunger Games is our unfortunate case study today, but the conversation touches on everything from the ratio’s rise to multiplex dominance to whatever the heck Michael Bay is doing with aspect ratios in his Transformers movies. Seriously, what is going on there.
In this episode, we discuss:
The different meanings for the word “cinemascope”, both as shorthand for a still-common aspect ratio around 2.39:1, and as a proprietary shooting process used by 20th Century Fox in the 50s and 60s.
The ratio’s gradual shift into dominance as the standard-issue aspect ratio for mainstream cinema.
Why you might choose to use a “scope” ratio instead of a taller/narrower frame — and vice versa.
How The Hunger Games exemplifies the poor creative decisions and consequences of the current cinemascope trend.
Why alternatives to scope are important — and why scope might be less of a box office draw than people think.
Additional resources:
The dress scene in The Hunger Games, where the width of the frame makes it difficult to frame in both the flaming hem and Jennifer Lawrence’s face.
In Die Hard (1988), the bokeh (the part of the image that’s out of focus) is often full of ovals, a telltale result of the anamorphic lenses used to shoot a scope frame that starts out squished in-camera and gets stretched wide later.
The scope frames of Sergio Leone westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) were accomplished with spherical lenses, an approach that usually offers a lower resolution, but creates less distortion and — when shooting on film — reduces costs more than an anamorphic process.
Many contemporary blockbusters like Sully (2016) are filmed for both a typical 2.39:1 exhibition and a 1.9:1 IMAX presentation, necessitating that filmmakers either privilege one ratio over the other or attempt to compromise between both.
The second film in the Hunger Games series, Catching Fire, presents its entire deathmatch sequence (roughly 50 minutes of the film) in a taller ratio for IMAX as mentioned above. The transition to that ratio is cleverly motivated.
Michael Bay has a particularly idiosyncratic approach, framing different aspect ratios for different cameras to maximize resolution. This can result in some rapid shifting between ratios, even in mundane scenes like this dialogue sequence in Transformers: The Last Knight (2017). It’s kind of a lot.
In The Avengers (2012), one of only two Marvel Cinematic Universe films shot in a 16x9 ratio, the taller aspect ratio permits greater opportunities for verticality in its skyscraper-laden climax.
The eccentrically-presented Widescreen Museum is a fabulous trove of resources from history of widescreen movies. One of their more interesting (though oft-inaccurate) pieces is this booklet, commissioned by 20th Century Fox and written by one of their more experienced CinemaScope cinematographers, Charles G. Clarke. The article is an early firsthand account of an artist seriously grappling with the challenges and potential of the format, and is filled with both fascinating ideas, as well as its fair share of apocryphal claims. For instance, its proposed use of panning sound from left to right in stereo as characters travel through the frame as an analogous substitute for a visually panned camera remains an intriguing and progressive concept, but the claim that close ups are “a relic of the silent film” is nonsense: “It was necessary in those days to show facial expression, because the screen was small and there was no dialogue to convey what the scene was about.”