A5p3ct Rat105

When tracing the origin of many a cinematic technique, Abel Gance's landmark 1927 epic Napoléon makes an entrance - this is also the case with the subject of film-makers operating with more than one aspect ratio in their films. Napoléon had the most of the movie in 1.33 ratio, but the finale expands to three cinema screens (Polyvision), which show three seperate images side by side, and at times one single very wide visual.

 CinemaScope is generally excepted to have arrived on the movie scene in 1953; this however ignores not only the early scope films of the early 1930's (The Big Trail and The Bat Whispers among others), but such unexcepted exceptions as William Dieterle's 1948 haunting, slightly boring ghost tale Portrait of Jennie. Most of the film was in full frame 1.37 aspect ratio and in black & white, but the final shot was in color. Ditto the color suprise (similar to The Picture of Dorian Gray movie released three years earlier),  some special theatres gave the storm sequence finale a green tint (restored for the DVD) and had a wider screen ratio of 2.18 (not restored on the current DVDs).

In the 1950's, to underwrite the way that a painter creates in many shapes of the frame, Henri-Georges Clouzot used two aspect ratios for his documentary The Mystery of Picasso (see previous blog entry on distorted visuals). Kubrick filmed Dr Strangelove using two aspect ratios (full frame 1.37 and 1.66) with in-camera mattes, which take turns during the movie to a little bewildering effect - the initial DVD release preserved this, but the anamorphic release changed the film visually to 1.66 only.

The act of using numerous screen shapes does rise its head from time to time, such as in director Alejandro González Iñárritu's cancer drama from 2010, Biutiful, which utlizes both the 1.85 and scope 2.35 ratios. Cartoon series like Samurai Jack push the concept of changing aspect ratios to self-consciously absurd extremes. IMAX productions have an endemic tendency to use numerous aspect ratios -- from a tiny square to utilizing the entire picture space that at its best fills the viewer's entire field of vision.

A film that is usually missing from the discussions on movies with multiple aspect ratios is Orson Welles' confusing noir The Lady from Shanghai - the lauded and much-copied (Enter the Dragon, anyone?) mirror finale has the film mutating to a letterboxed ratio of about 1.66, slightly wider from the full frame 1.37 that the film is in. According to Peter Boghdanovich, Welles' inspiration for the different aspect ratio -- done with in-camera mattes, was D.W. Griffith, and how he masked the image with the iris in his silent productions.

The finale of Lady from Shanghai however is not the only scene which dissents from the 1.37 ratio that the rest of the movie possesses -- the funhouse sequence earlier on instead goes the other route - an aspect ratio which was narrower, of about 1.19, conjuring up memories of early sound films which employed this particular shape (which was praised by Sergei Eisenstein for its dynamism), such as Fritz Lang's M and the excellent The Testament of Dr Mabuse (below), along with Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr.

...

 

SFX maestro Douglas Trumbull's 1983 movie Brainstorm is a proto-Strange Days tale of technology that records human sensations for others to experience. The narrative scenes are in 1.85 while the sensorial tapes shot in POV widened the screen to scope (2.20 in 70mm, and 2.35 in 35mm prints). The sensation recordings are reminiscent of amusement park contraptions, where people would go standing in a dark room, and POV footage of rollercoaster rides and such was blasted on a big screen - they had these as long as still during my childhood in the early 1990's. The widescreen video releases of Brainstorm faithfully preserve the screen sizes, but here the letterboxing gets bigger in the sensation recording sequences due to the wider aspect ratio, causing the image aperture to actually diminish - not exactly what the film-makers originally envisioned.

  
Update: There's a Blu-ray disc of Brainstorm out now -- it is presented in 2.35 ratio, with windowboxing for the narrative scenes to maintain the smaller aspect ratio - while this accomplishes that the disc stays faithful to the fact that the picture indeed widens for the Xperience-O-Helmet shots, it comes with the cost of a tinier image and lower resolution, which make for most of the movie. This decision of presentation seems to have gathered mostly negative reactions thus far from film buffs.

a

Hiroshi Teshigahara's arthouse horror The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) from 1966 is one tough, neat film. It's a situation where the director seems (m)eager to take creative risks at seemingly every corner. The movie centers on a facially sca(r)red businessman, who receives an astonishingly life-like mask, which gives him a reneissance in identity.

Speaking of those creative risks I mentioned before, halfway through the story, we are apruptly introduced to a sub-plot, which is parallel tale of a woman suffering a fate similar to the main character. The jarring narrative quality is enchanced by the sudden shift of aspect ratio (!) from full frame 1.37 to about 2.00, which lasts for a brief time.

Teshigahara's film is a must-see, in both of the screen formats it deploys.

Ending on a light note, a Video Nasty that should be on your to-see list is the campy (!!) concentration camp and war turkey The Beast in Heat - the sic-happy on-screen title during the lonesome opening credits actually is The Horrifing Experiments of SS Last Days. Above is the Dutch tape from the appropriately named video label - the (w)hole pride and glory(hole) of my VHS collection.

I don't have a clue about how the DVD releases of the film handle it, but the VHS has at least three different aspect ratios at work. This eclectic quality about screen formats goes to pretty absurd measures during the silly war sequences that stand in for the dubious finale - at times almost every single shot seems to be in a different aspect ratio - it's a true conflict on a meta-cinematic level as well, it seems.