Cutting Rates and Shot Scales in 1950S Cinemascope: a Systematic Style Analysis
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Cutting Rates and Shot Scales in 1950s CinemaScope: A Systematic Style Analysis Sam Roggen In the early 1950s Hollywood explored several new technologies in order to fight a major box office decline. In 1948, more than 90 million Americans had visited the theatre at least once a week, but this figure decreased to 51 million in 1952. [1] In 1953, only 32.4 per cent of all cinemas were making profit from the sale of tickets. [2] Twentieth-Century Fox, the studio of president Spyros S. Skouras and executive in charge of production Darryl F. Zanuck, did not escape the crisis. While Skouras had announced record profits in May 1946, the studio’s revenues were falling rapidly by the end of 1948. [3] In 1952, Fox’s incomes from admissions reached the lowest point since 1943. [4] The different tendencies that caused this economic decline have been extensively commented upon. The Paramount Consent Decree of May 1948 had demanded the studios to divest themselves of their theatre holdings, while the prohibition against block booking kept them from imposing units of multiple inferior pictures on exhibitors. [5] To make matters worse, the investigations of the House Committee on Un- American Activities had prompted successful boycott campaigns against films made by alleged left-wingers. [6] More importantly, Hollywood was failing to respond to the needs of a heavily changed and diversified audience. Postwar baby boomers had moved to the suburbs, far from the downtown first-run movie theatres. [7] There they were developing new leisure-time activities, outside (outdoor sports, barbecues and recreation parks), but especially inside the house, as the television became a popular alternative to the big screen. Although Tino Balio has argued that “TV did not make significant inroads into moviegoing until the mid- fifties”, it is often identified as the main reason for Hollywood’s economic crisis: the more Americans acquired television receivers, the less they attended film theaters. [8] In response to these developments, the film industry needed to strengthen the appeal of its product. After experiments with three-colour Technicolor, stereophonic sound and 3-D, the success of the three-strip widescreen process Cinerama in 1952 finally convinced Hollywood that widescreen could lure back moviegoers. Four studios of the Big Five (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures and Twentieth-Century Fox) looked into the possibility of creating their own widescreen system. Eventually, Fox obtained the formula for the anamorphic Hypergonar lens, developed by French astronomer Henri Chrétien, only one day before he was contacted by Warner’s representatives. [9] In February 1953, the studio started filming its first CinemaScope pictures. The anamorphic technology which CinemaScope was based on had a clear impact on how films were made and on how they looked. While Fox filmed its first Scope pictures – How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953), The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953) and Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (Robert D. Webb, 1953) – with the original Chrétien lenses, manufacturer Bausch & Lomb would provide several revised designs throughout the 1950s. Despite various updates to the Hypergonar, they did, however, never manage to eliminate all of the technical flaws. [10] The CinemaScope process relied on lens attachments that squeezed a wide-angle view onto 35mm film. During projection, the reversed mechanism unsqueezed the image, resulting in an aspect ratio of 2.66:1. This would be reduced to 2.55 because of engineering considerations, and to 2.35 after the addition of an optical soundtrack. The compression factor was roughly 2:1, but tended to vary across the surface of the lens. This made figures or objects near the edges of the image appear thinner than those positioned centrally. Even more remarkable, actors shot in close-up suffered from CinemaScope mumps, their faces stretched out horizontally. Actors and objects appeared at their sharpest when filmed from far back, so directors were advised to put the camera no closer than six or seven feet. [11] The first generations of CinemaScope lenses consisted of a prime lens and an anamorphic attachment which had to be focused separately. Filmmakers therefore had to avoid complex camera or character movements so that the focus did not have to be adapted during the shot. In addition, the anamorphic lens design, even after both lenses were joined in one unit, drastically reduced the light-gathering power. This had the most noticeable impact in the domain of staging: as the CinemaScope lenses provided very little depth of field, directors were forced to spread out the action over the lateral, rather than the recessive axis. A typical early CinemaScope composition contained several characters on one plane, relatively far from the camera, in a static layout. These changes made cutting less necessary, as such a composition often included all the essential elements of a scene. Moreover, quick cuts between long shots in widescreen were said to confuse rather than engage spectators. [12] The technical restrictions of the anamorphic technology had significant aesthetic consequences. In general, CinemaScope films had shots that lasted longer, the camera was put further back, compositions got more static, depth staging became rarer, and more characters were used in order to fill the frame. Despite the efforts Fox made in order to minimise reports on the extensive influence of CinemaScope on film style and production, its artistic personnel approached the transition with mixed feelings. Nonetheless, various critics, most notably those writing for Cahiers du cinéma in France and Movie in Britain, were famously enthusiastic about the stylistic choices the anamorphic widescreen system seemed to encourage. Their ideas still mark the discourse on CinemaScope style today. This article explores film style in 1950s CinemaScope. It focuses on the two stylistic elements that were most frequently commented upon by trade papers and critics: the length of the takes and the scale of the shots. Adopting a data-driven methodology, the article will analyze the quantifiable formal parameters average shot length (ASL) and shot scale in a stratified sample of 31 CinemaScope films released in the 1950s. In order to find explanations for the trends revealed by this dataset, it will take into account the various factors that could have influenced stylistic choices. Moreover, this study will also contain in-depth style analyses in order to demonstrate the materializations of some of the tendencies suggested by the data. In general, this study argues that CinemaScope had a clear impact on the production and style of 1950s Classical Hollywood films. Nevertheless, this shift did not affect what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson have called the stylistic norms of the studio era. [13] The introduction of CinemaScope, as the analyses will demonstrate, challenged filmmakers to adapt to heavily changed working conditions, but it did not remove any basic stylistic options from their range of choices. It does, however, offer a very suitable case for analyzing how a phase of technological transition challenged the Hollywood system to show its flexible nature. CinemaScope and Cinemetrics In order to study the cutting rates and distribution of shot scales of 1950 CinemaScope films, this article adopts a method which is generally being labeled “statistical style analysis”.1 This refers to the systematic measuring and examining of quantifiable stylistic parameters in a sample of films. Scholars have applied this methodology onto a variety of formal elements, ranging from camera movement and shot scale to luminance and sound, employing manual as well as automatised measuring tools. [14] Many researchers in this field have used complex statistical methodologies in order to measure large samples of Hollywood films, and identify broad tendencies and non-obvious patterns. [15] The method used in this study is more straightforward: in a first phase, the average shot lengths (ASL) and the distribution of shot scales in a sample of 1950s CinemaScope films were measured by using the digital tool Cinemetrics. Developed by Yuri Tsivian, Cinemetrics is “open-access interactive website designed to collect, store and process scholarly data about film”. [16] The measuring tool was originally designed to quantify cutting rates in films, but several scholars have used Cinemetrics to obtain data related to more complex parameters like shot scale, shot density or camera movement. The second phase entailed the identification of patterns within the obtained dataset. Subsequently, I sought to clarify these patterns by analyzing the production context and style of the films. Rather than employing complex statistical models, I aimed to provide film historical explanations for obvious tendencies within the data. Indeed, as Baxter has argued, the “statistical analysis of quantified filmic data is a means rather than an end”: it can highlight patterns and deviations, but these then need to be explained by film scholars. [17] Although the currently available tools allow for several stylistic parameters to be measured, this study focuses on cutting rates (quantified as average shot length) and shot types or sizes (quantified as the distribution of shot scales). Salt has listed these as the most significant stylistic characteristics and the ones that lend themselves the most easily to quantitative analysis. [18] Additionally, both ASL and shot scale are relevant to examine in the context of CinemaScope, as they have been the most frequently commented upon by filmmakers, critics and scholars when discussing film style in anamorphic widescreen. While the distortion problems and poor light gathering power of the lenses made it difficult to shoot close-ups in CinemaScope, Fox trivialised this by claiming that the vast image could show great detail, thereby eliminating the need for close-ups. Even in shots with two or more characters, Zanuck argued, “each one of them seemed to be in an individual close-up”. [19] In addition, various trade press articles supported the elimination of the necessity to cut that CinemaScope prompted.