CinemaScope

CinemaScope, wide-screen anamorphic-lens film process. CinemaScope was originally developed by the French inventor Henri Chrétien in the mid-1920s using a lens that had been used in aerial photography. It was introduced to commercial cinema by 20th Century-Fox in 1953 with the biblical story, The Robe, and the musical, How to Marry a Millionaire. Its “letter-box” ratio, originally 2.55:1, gave a greater-than-normal field of vision. Claude Autant-Lara, the French film director, experimented with Chrétien's lens as early as 1928, but the impetus in the 1950s was simply to see off the competition from television by offering “spectacular” cinema.

CinemaScope required a special (“anamorphic”) lens on the camera to squeeze the image on to the film and another, identical, lens on the projector to “unsqueeze” it for the screen. A later development squeezed the anamorphic image on to standard 35-mm film. The term “Scope” became synonymous with “wide-screen” as other companies and studios developed competitive systems, often with similar names: Agascope (Swedish), Alexscope (Argentine), CameraScope (French), Dyaliscope (French), Superscope (American), TechniScope (American), Sovscope (USSR), Tohoscope (Japanese), and TotalScope (Italian) are just some examples. Neither CinemaScope, its later development CinemaScope 55, nor any of its variants survived in the wake of other wide-screen systems, although Super-Panavision 70 was used to brilliant effect for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), directed by David Lean. VistaVision, which was non-anamorphic and less wide than CinemaScope, used two 35-mm frames instead of one and was introduced by Paramount in White Christmas in 1954. For most screenings the two frames were squeezed on to one, which gave an extremely detailed picture.

Multi-camera systems, notably Cinerama and Cinemiracle, disappeared in favour of single film systems of which Panavision, an anamorphic 35-mm system, has become the dominant wide-screen process and has replaced CinemaScope.