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Widescreen Vs. Pan and Scan 1 Too Wide to Please?

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Widescreen Vs. Pan and Scan 1 Too Wide to Please? Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan 1 Too Wide to Please? A Comparison of Audience Responses to Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan Presentation Kimberly A. Neuendorf [email protected] Evan A. Lieberman [email protected] Lingli Ying [email protected] Pete Lindmark [email protected] School of Communication Cleveland State University Cleveland, OH 44115 July 18, 2009 Paper to be presented to the Visual Communication Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan 2 Too Wide to Please? A Comparison of Audience Responses to Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan Presentation Abstract Motivated by film industry concerns over “pan and scanning” and a dearth of empirical research on audiences, an experiment was conducted. 71 subjects viewed sequences from four films presented in either widescreen or pan and scan format. Results show (a) audiences split in their preferences, (b) differences in viewers’ perceptual outcomes between formats, (c) different perceptual factors predict positive affect, (d) the specific film is highly predictive for both perceptual outcomes and positive affect. Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan 3 Too Wide to Please? A Comparison of Audience Responses to Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan Presentation Introduction and Literature Review Background In 1997 the Danish Director’s Guild filed a lawsuit on behalf of American film director Sydney Pollack against a Danish television network, claiming that their 1991 broadcast of Three Days of the Condor had violated Pollack’s rights as an artist because the film was shown in the pan and scan format, cropped from its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio to fit the 4:3 ratio of television. The judge found in Pollack’s favor, writing in his verdict that: The adjustment by pan scanning of the widescreen film to the television format has resulted in considerable cut away of the pictures, with the consequence that the composition of the picture must be considered mutilated, and that details of importance for the characterization are gone, resulting in disagreement between picture and dialogue (quoted in Jacobsen, 1997, p. 24) A contract technicality kept Pollack from winning the case, but the principle that pan and scan violated not just the film but the artistic rights of its author(s) was clearly established – at least in Denmark. Jacobsen, who was chair of the Nordic section of SMPTE, states “this case should really have been prosecuted in the United States where the offensive pan-scan practice started, but hopefully the case against Danmarks Radio will result in a clear statement, that mutilation of film by pan-scanning offends the ‘Droit Morale' rights” (p. 23). Outside of colorization, very few issues have roused the ire of both filmmakers and film scholars like pan and scan. Director Martin Scorsese in an interview with Entertainment Weekly (Patterson, 2001) has called the pan and scan presentation of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, “a great calamity. A disgrace. A great sin in a way,” referring to the Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan 4 practice as a moral issue. Tashiro (1991) offers the standard academic assessment of pan and scan when he notes that “useful analysis of films on video cannot be performed when 43 percent of the image has been cropped, and certainly no one can claim to have seen(!) the film on video under such circumstances” (p. 15). Barr (1963), writing about the CinemaScope widescreen format contends that “The more open the frame, the greater the impression of depth; the image is more vivid, and involves us more directly” (p. 9). While this idea might be widely shared among scholars of film, the fact remains that Barr’s assumptions have never been empirically tested, and so the effect of the wider image on an audience is not known with any certainty, nor is the change in the impact of that image when it is cropped via pan and scan for television exhibition. Aspect ratio, the dimensions of the image or of the exhibition screen measured as width-by-height, has long been a vexing problem for film scholars, filmmakers, and the moving image industries. At the root of the difficulty is the fact that there are many different aspect ratios in which the image might be produced, there are also quite a number of possible dimensions for the viewing screen, and there is no guarantee that an image produced in one aspect ratio will be exhibited in that same format, thus requiring some modification to the original image in order to get it to fit the screen. The original aspect ratio of motion pictures was standardized early in the development of the medium as 4:3 (or 1.33:1) producing an image that was only slightly wider than it was tall. For decades there were only occasional experiments with widescreen, notably French filmmaker Abel Gance’s Polyvision process that he utilized for selected sequences in his 1927 film Napolean as Seen by Abel Gance, which employed three cameras and three projectors to create an image with an aspect ratio of roughly 4:1. Gance could show his film in the Polyvision format only in specially equipped theaters and so prints of the film to be shown in regular theaters had to mask, or black out, the top and Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan 5 bottom of the frame during the three-camera sequences, creating the first instance of letterboxing. The problem really began with the advent of television and the Hollywood film industry’s not coincidentally concurrent development of various widescreen production and exhibition formats, beginning with Cinerama in 1952 (similar to Polyvision in its three-camera, three projector initial version), continuing with various large gauge film formats such as Todd- AO’s 65/70mm in 1955, and becoming standardized by the 1960s with Panavision’s perfection of the CinemaScope anamorphic lens which distorted the image by squeezing the sides of the frame, which would then be elongated with a complementary lens on the projector, 1 creating an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. The various applications of this wide frame have been a source of interest to film scholars from technical and industrial perspectives (e.g., Deutelbaum, 2003; Edmonds, 2007). A complete detailing of the history of widescreen processes may be found in Belton’s seminal work, Widescreen Cinema (1992). These widescreen technologies certainly helped differentiate Hollywood’s films from television programming with its classic 1.33:1 aspect ratio, but complications arose when widescreen films were sold for American television broadcast beginning in 1960.2 The first film to receive the pan and scan treatment in the U.S. was the 1953 film How to Marry a Millionaire, for which 20th Century Fox developed an optical printing process in 1961 that used what became termed a “finder frame” in each shot to signal a computer that could aid in the tracking of the most dramatically significant portion of the frame (Belton, 1992, pp. 216- 217). In order to crop the 2.35:1 image to 1.33:1 without losing important narrative information, either the sides of the shot were simply cut off or the printer could pan within the image to find the salient action, or at times the single shot could be made into two separate shots so that the television audience could still see what had previously been the two sides of Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan 6 the same frame. Though the result was a radical change in the composition of the image, and at times the editing rhythm of the film, few audience members complained and as the technology has improved substantially, the practice has become standardized for roughly the past fifty years. In Belton’s essay “Pan and Scan Scandals” (1987), he provides a litany of pan and scan abuses of cinematic aesthetics, including John Wayne’s nose talking to Robert Stack’s ear in The High and the Mighty (1954), the excising of two of the Three Stooges from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and the mutilation of stars’ names in the credits of Picnic, in which William Holden becomes William Ho (pp. 41-49; see also Kerbel, 1977). Despite the development of the “TV Safe” markings on the ground glass of the motion picture camera’s viewfinder in 1962 (Beyer, 1962), which according to Belton resulted in “filmmakers making two films instead of one” (1992, p. 224), the situation has only grown increasingly complex. Not only is there a great variety of widescreen formats used today, including 1.66:1, referred to as European Widescreen, and 16:9, the standard for High Definition Television, when the aspect ratios of the wide array of available viewing devices which now include computer screens, cell phones, handheld video displays, video kiosks, as well as cinema screens and televisions (both standard 4:3 aspect ratio and the newer 16:9) are taken into account, the possible interactions become dizzying. Despite the widespread practices of pan and scan, letterboxing, which masks the top and bottom of the screen to preserve the widescreen aspect ratio on 4:3 screens, pillarboxing, which masks the sides of the image to maintain the 4:3 ratio on widescreen displays, and the various stretch and zoom functions that are common on widescreen televisions, there has been virtually no scholarly inquiry as to how the modifying of the image affects audience enjoyment, narrative comprehension, dramatic effect, and thematic understanding. This study seeks to begin answering such questions. Widescreen vs. Pan and Scan 7 Review of Science/Behavioral Science Literature Essentially no scientific or behavioral scientific literature addresses the notion of spectators’ responses to widescreen versus pan and scan filmic images; as Holmes (2004) contends, cinema studies tend to concentrate on industry and text, not audience (p.
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