8
Widescreen composition and film
Finding ways to compose for the new shape
As we discussed in the previous chapter, the widescreen format was promoted as a new visual experience. Following on from Cinerama, Twentieth Century Fox introduced CinemaScope, and head of production Darryl Zanuck repeatedly reminded his directors that they should take full advantage of the screen width by staging action all the way across the frame – in his words, ‘keep the people spread out’. He wanted the audience to experience the full width of the new screen shape. Initially it was the technology that was being promoted rather than story or stars.
There had been a fashion in Academy ratio black and white films to stage in depth with tight groups in the foreground and background. The lack of colour film sensitivity, and initially the longer lenses available for CinemaScope, did not allow the same depth-of-field for this type of staging and so alternative compositions – the ‘washing line’ staging demanded by Zanuck – were a practical solution as well as a commercial imperative. Anamorphic shorter focal length lenses (standard in black and white production) produced distortion, dizzying swoops in perspective when panned and curved horizon lines. Later, Panavision allowed a wider choice of lenses and colour film sensitivity improved.
There was a continuous discussion on what changes were required in the standard 4:3 visual framing conventions that had developed in cinema since its beginnings. Academy ratio and staging in depth encouraged the spectator to look into the frame; widescreen and staging across the frame required the spectator to scan across the frame. When depth was added to width in widescreen films, the director or cinematographer had to devise ways of directing the attention across the frame and into the frame. The American film director Howard Hawks complained that the audience had too much to look at.
In Academy ratio composition blocking, when people were split at either end of the frame, either they were restaged or the camera repositioned to ‘lose’ the space between them. Cinema widescreen compositions relied less on the previous fashion for tight, diagonal, dynamic groupings in favour of seeing the participants in a setting. But using the full widescreen width as required by the studio bosses could have an unintended meaning. In a widescreen frame, a two shot with actors on either side of the frame left a large space in the centre of the frame. An audience may understand this image to signify that the two people were estranged or ‘distant’ with each other compared with a similar shot in Academy ratio.
Lining up the actors across the frame was quickly abandoned in favour of masking off portions of the frame with unimportant bland areas in order to emphasize the main subject. This effectively created a frame within a frame. Other compositions simply grouped the participants in the centre of the frame and allowed the edges to look after themselves – a premature ‘protect and save’ design (see below). There were directors who balanced an off-centre artiste with a small area of colour or highlight on the opposite side of the frame. This type of widescreen composition was destroyed if the whole frame was not seen (e.g., when broadcast on 4:3 television).
The initial concern was that the decrease in frame height meant that shots had to be looser and therefore had less dramatic tension. Another problem was that if artistes were staged at either side of the screen, the intervening setting became more prominent.
Many film directors exploited the compositional potential of the new shape. They made big bold compositional widescreen designs knowing that they would be seen in the cinema as they were framed. Their adventurous widescreen compositions were later massacred on TV with pan and scan or simply being shown in 4:3 with the sides chopped off.
Figure 8.1 (a) This three shot composition uses the full width of the widescreen but it could not be adequately converted for 4:3 TV showing. If there was an attempt to produce two shots (b) and (c) in order to cover the dialogue exchange between the two outside characters, the middle character would jump across frame on the cut. If a centre portion of the shot was used (d) then both dialogue actors would be out of shot
Widescreen advantages
There were several compositional advantages of widescreen. Although very big close-ups on a giant screen were slightly ludicrous, directors could stage dialogue scenes between two or three characters within the same frame in close shot without intercutting. Because of the screen width, closer shots of actors would still leave space for location of background action (if it could be held in focus). Widescreen, in the words of the director Henry King, ‘allows cause and effect to be shown in the same shot’.
With the technical problems solved, the solutions to guiding attention were found and widescreen composition quickly reverted to similar stagings used in Academy format. The fear of ‘too much to look at’ was eventually seen as an advantage and compositions were created that had a rich visual complexity. The other end of visual design is seen in David Lean's ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962) where, in a very wide shot, two camel riders gallop towards each other from opposite sides of the screen. The staging of the action contrasts the space of the desert with the smallness of the characters. This is widescreen spectacle as envisaged when the screen shape was changed but achieved with an almost empty frame instead of cramming it with action. The same sense of space is created by John Sturges in ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ (1955) in the title sequence featuring a train travelling in an empty landscape. These widescreen compositions reinforce the old advice that sometimes ‘less means more’.
Widescreen composition, once the technology allowed, returned to Academy format conventions with complex camera movement, staging to provide lines of force across or into the background and eye line glances to counterweigh the composition. Lighting, focus zone, actor position and setting directed the spectator's attention to the dominant subject/s of the shot.
Selling off the redundant format
Film, and later TV, always had problems with the mismatch between recorded aspect ratio and the aspect ratio of display. In the 1950s it had been the non-standard widescreen formats that caused problems in cinema screenings. Even in April 1953, the first year of widescreen, in order for Paramount to get a ‘widescreen’ film into the cinema, ‘Shane’ (1953), which had been shot Academy ratio, was recommended by Paramount to be projected in a 1.66:1 ratio. Cropping the original frame provided a bargain basement version of widescreen.
Academy ratio became associated with TV, whilst widescreen ratio was linked to film. The back film libraries of the studios were now considered obsolete and could be sold off to TV. But not only ‘flat’ (screen) aspect ratio productions. In September 1961, Twentieth Century Fox's ‘How to Marry a Millionaire’ became the first wide-screen film to be shown on television in the USA. It was also the first film to be panned and scanned with a very primitive pan/scan device.
Pan and scan
Any widescreen aspect ratio other than Academy format created problems when shown on a 4:3 television screen. It could be shown with large black bands at the top and bottom of the TV screen, but broadcasters considered this was unacceptable to the viewer. If the full height of a widescreen frame filled the TV screen, then only a portion of the width could be seen. At the worst, 43 per cent of the film area is lost in pan and scan transfers of 2.35:1 format. Of 1.85:1 format, 28 per cent is lost in pan and scan transfers.
As many early widescreen films intentionally filled the full width of the frame, at the very least compositions could be wrecked and at the very worst, important subjects could be out of the frame when shown on TV (see Figure 8.1). In an early widescreen film, ‘The High and the Mighty’ (1954) shown on television, John Wayne's nose talks to Robert Stack's ear across a TV frame filled with an aircraft cockpit.
Figure 8.2 Nose talks to ear on television
These early widescreen film compositions made no concession to the film being viewed on television. When transmitted on a 4:3 TV screen attempts were made to ‘pan’ the image to keep significant action within the transmission frame. The ‘pan and scan’ conversion of wide-screen to 4:3 aspect ratio often introduced unmotivated pans following dialogue from one side of the widescreen to the other. Portions of the widescreen composition were plundered from the original shot to form new shots and this devalued the original camerawork and editing.
Pan and scan either took a portion of the frame that was considered the most important (usually dialogue led) or panned from subject to subject to follow dialogue or cut from one portion of the screen to another portion of the screen (again following dialogue) introducing a cutting rate that never occurred when the film was originally produced.
These decisions were usually made by a technician employed by the broadcasting organizations working to a simple rule of keeping whoever was speaking in a 4:3 frame, or to follow the central character. This elimination of up to 43 per cent of the frame significantly altered the look, pace and tempo of the film In 1985 Woody Allen managed to secure a contractual agreement with United Artists giving him control of the video versions of his films. He introduced letterboxing on the video cassette versions of his work. Twentieth Fox developed an optical printer that extracted a 4:3 portion of a CinemaScope frame to provide a print for television. Whatever system was used, up to 43 per cent of the original frame was lost and the aesthetics of the film completely altered.
Cinematographers alarmed
Cinematographers and directors were naturally alarmed at the way their widescreen compositions were butchered by the pan and scan process. The reframing and recutting of the film for TV transmission was completely out of their control. Many film makers began to take precautions against the worst excesses of this arbitrary and casual recomposing and recutting of their productions.
They had to consider when shooting a film, that if shown on TV (as films often were) they were, in effect, creating a production for two incompatible aspect ratios. The simple solution would be to group any significant information in the centre of frame. This made for ugly widescreen compositions and in effect negated the whole reason for having a wider format.
During the late 1960s and 1970s, they devised other and more subtle ways of providing compositions suitable for the two formats. One solution was to keep the dominant subject/s in an area of the frame that could be cleanly extracted for 4:3 viewing, but to use the remaining 50 per cent of the widescreen frame for supporting visual motifs to amplify or reinforce the main plot structure. These helped to enrich the visual images but could be deleted for a simpler television shot structure.
The disposable two-shot was another popular fudge to bridge the two formats. In widescreen the two-shot was standard framing of a foreground figure with their back to camera. When this was panned and scanned for television, the foreground figure's back of head could easily be lost, turning the widescreen shot into a standard MCU. The reverse shot of this set-up was similarly turned into a MCU.
In a similar way, singles of actors were framed either extreme right or left for intercut dialogue scenes. When the 4:3 frame was extracted most of the empty widescreen space was lost and standard intercut dialogue shots remained.
Figure 8.3 The disposable two shot allowed pan/scan cropping when converting a widescreen film (a) for TV transmission to produce a clean MCU (b). The reverse two shot would produce a complementary MCU
Boom in shot
A secondary problem with TV transmissions of widescreen films was that many films achieved a 1.66:1 or 1.85:1 aspect ratio by cropping or masking the top and bottom of a standard 35 mm frame. These films were shot in full frame with the intention of a widescreen aperture plate being used in the projector. The top and bottom of the 35 mm frame could include booms, lamps, shooting off the top of sets, etc., because they were in a part of the frame that would never be seen by a cinema audience. When shown on TV, the whole of the frame was transmitted and this unrequired ‘garbage’ was seen by the TV viewer. More of Faye Dunaway's nudity in the opening sequence of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967) was seen by TV viewers than by cinema audiences.
The growth of multiplexes
Apart from television format incompatibility, two problems often occur in widescreen cinema projection. The first is a simple lack of communication when labelling film cans. Often no detailed advice about the right aspect ratio is mentioned apart from ‘scope’, and if the print shows Academy frames (as most American prints do) it is very difficult for the projectionist to guess which aspect ratio mask and which lens will be required. Contrary to this, the sound systems are very clearly defined! Regardless of the aperture plate used in the camera, the prints should show the one aspect ratio established by the director and the DoP.
Often only one projectionist operates all projectors. In the proliferation of Multiplexes in Europe, a projector may have only one anamorphic lens and a spherical lens plus variable masks. Selecting lens and mask automatically sets the screen curtains. If the projector can only handle Cinemascope/1.85:1 formats the top and bottom of films shot in 1.375:1 or 1.66:1 are projected outside of the screen! The number of cinemas that are able to screen all formats is decreasing.
Common topline and super 35
To protect essential information in one format for viewing in another format causes a number of problems, no more so than in the protection of headroom. Safeguarding the top of the frame to avoid heads being cropped resulted in the development of the common topline on super 35 mm The full aperture area is exposed but each format (2.35:1, 1.85:1, 1.66:1 and 1.33:1) share a common topline. However the print is projected, the headroom is safeguarded, even if the sides of the wider frames are cropped for a narrower width viewing format.
This does involve the lower part of the frame, which is not part of the widescreen frame, being seen when the whole frame is transmitted in 4:3. Cables, tracks, microphones are often just below the widescreen frame but these will all be seen in the bottom part of the 1.33:1 TV frame. The use of zoom lenses can also cause problems because the middle of the 2.35:1 frame is not only offset horizontally because of the super 35 format but is also higher than the middle of the regular frame. When zooming, the centre of the lens needs to coincide with the centre of the aspect ratio otherwise the camera will need to be continuously reframed to compensate.
Summary
Directors and cameramen attempted to use the full width of wide-screen but were finally forced to find ways of shooting for two aspect ratios – CinemaScope and TV.
Television converted widescreen film for its 4:3 aspect ratio by the crude use of pan and scan.