A pre-film slide at the Brattle Theatre reveals that CinemaScope was one of the first English words in common usage with a capital letter in the middle. [Something like that, anyway.] It was just the sort of trivia that, once learned, is impossible to forget. So when the cinetrix came across the word earlier today with the "s" down [as we editors like to say], her quick fact-checking Google foray devolved into an impromptu history lesson about this spectacular development in cinema.
I had no idea that Roland Barthes meditated "On CinemaScope" [in an essay translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum]. The cinetrix had nearly forgotten how delightful a cultural critic Barthes was.
Up until now, the look of the spectator has been that of someone lying prone and buried, walled up in the darkness, receiving cinematic nourishment rather like the way a patient is fed intravenously. Here the position is totally different: I am on an enormous balcony, I move effortlessly within the field's range, I freely pick out what interests me, in a word I begin to be surrounded, and my larval state is replaced by the euphoria of an equal amount of circulation between the spectacle and my body.The darkness itself is transformed: in the ordinary film, it is tomb-like, I am still in the cave of myths, I have a little flame of illumination which flickers far above me, and I receive the truth of the images like heavenly grace. Here, on the contrary, the cord that binds me to the screen is no longer thread-like, it's a full volume of brightness that is established apart from me, I don't receive the image by those long threads of light that one sees transfixing and feeding the stigmatists, I lean forward on my elbows, becoming as horizontal as the spectacle, and out of my larval state emerge as a little god because here I am, no longer under the image but in front of it, in the middle of it, separated from it by this ideal distance, necessary to creation, which is no longer that of the glance but that of the arm's reach (God and painters always have outstretched arms).
Oooo, what he said.
The cinetrix just remembers racing to screenings of Lawrence of Arabia at the Wang Center--it was always February and freezing--arriving just in time [more than once], and having to sit so close to the 60-foot-wide screen that she needed to physically move her head from side to side to take it all in. She also swears she could see up the camels' noses.
There's a concise technical history of 'Scope here, for you gearheads. And the Widescreen Museum will lead you gently through the thickets of other anamorphic processes like Cinerama, VistaVision, and one of the cinetrix's personal favorites, Todd-AO.
[The Museum's poster gallery is hilarious. The cinetrix is especially taken by The Bonnie Parker Story: Cigar Smoking Hellcat of the Roaring Twenties and the legend atop the My Tale Is Hot poster: It's a Regular Panties Inferno!]
Live large this weekend.
