Widescreen

A widescreen image is a film image with a greater aspect ratio than the ordinary 35 millimeter frame. The rationale is that, since the human eye has a field of view that extends further to the sides than it does above or below, a widescreen image makes more effective use of the field of view, thereby producing a more immersive viewing experience.

Methodologies

Note that aspect ratio refers here to the projected image. There are various ways of producing a widescreen image of any given proportion. These are listed below in the order of popularity.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• Masked: the film is shot in standard ratio, but the top and bottom of the picture are masked off by mattes in the projector. Alternatively, a hard matte in the camera may be used to mask off those areas while filming. Once again the picture quality is reduced because only part of the image is being expanded to full height. Sometimes films are designed to be shown in cinemas in masked widescreen format but the full unmasked frame is used for television. A low-budget movie called Secret File: Hollywood, often ridiculed as a collection of bloopers, is actually an example of a film that is always projected wrong. All the lights and microphone booms visible above the actors should be concealed by a projection matte, creating an image that would fill a wide screen for little money.
• Anamorphic: used by CinemaScope, Panavision and others. Anamorphic camera lenses compress the image horizontally so that it fits a standard frame, and anamorphic projection lenses restore the image and spread it over the wide screen. The picture quality is reduced because the image is stretched to twice the original area, but improvements in film and lenses have made this less noticeable.
• Super gauges: the full negative frame, including the area traditionally reserved for the sound track, is filmed using a wider gate. The print is then optically shrunk and/or cropped in order to fit it back onto release prints with an optical sound track. The aspect ratio for Super 35 can be set to virtually any projectable standard.
• Large gauge: a 70mm film frame is not only twice as wide as a standard frame but also has greater height. Shooting and projecting a film in 70mm therefore gives more than twice the image area of non-anamorphic 35mm film with no loss of quality. No major dramatic narrative film has been filmed on this format in almost ten years (the last being the Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet), although big release-films do sometimes strike 70mm "roadshow" prints from 35mm masters. Paramount's VistaVision was a large gauge precursor to 70mm film which used 35mm film in a horizontal, double-wide process. VistaVision is still used for shooting special effects, and is notable for its use in Lucasfilm's first three StarWars films, among others.
• Multiple camera/projector: the Cinerama system originally involved shooting with three synchronized cameras locked together side by side, and projecting the three resulting films on a curved screen with three synchronized projectors. Later Cinerama movies were shot in 70mm anamorphic (see below), and the resultant widescreen image was divided into three by optical printer lenses to produce the final threefold prints. The technical drawbacks of Cinerama are discussed in its own article. Only one feature film, How the West Was Won was shot in "pure" Cinerama. With the exception of a few films created sporadically for use in specialty Cinerama theaters (very few of which exist), the format is essentially dead. A non-Cinerama (due to differing aspect ratios) three-projector process was famously pioneered for the final reel of Abel Gance's 1927 epic, Napoleon. Consisting of three 1.33 images side by side, the total aspect ratio of the image is 4:1. The technical difficulties in mounting a full screening of the film, however, make most theaters unwilling or unable to show it properly.
• 70mm anamorphic: 70mm with anamorphic lenses creates an even wider high-quality picture. (Known as Ultra-Panavision and MGM-65, and most famously used in the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, this system is basically obsolete, although it would likely be technically easy to revive.)