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Throughout film history innovators and trailblazers have tried their hands at developing systems based around larger than 4-perforation 35mm capture and exhibition. Over the decades this idea of an enlarged capture area has become linked with movie epics from ‘Vertigo’ (1958) to ‘Lawerence of Arabia’ (1962) and countless other classics.
Whilst the viability of this format had dwindled by the 1980s, in recent years contemporary filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Kenneth Branagh have resurrected an interest in 65mm and even IMAX production and exhibition by creating impactful images that captivate modern audiences and see them returning to cinemas for big-screen extravaganza.
In even more recent times camera manufactures such as Arri have introduced digital sensors to the market based around the 65mm standard and upcoming cameras from the likes of Blackmagic Design suggest this spectacle format is going to be available to many more filmmakers in the near future.
Cooke Optics have recently announced plans to launch the Panchro 65/i series of lenses. An optically and mechanically matched set of 6 newly designed prime lenses for use on image formats based around the 65mm film standard and larger. The lens design aesthetic takes its cues from the legendary Speed Panchro line which has been beloved by filmmakers since the early 20th century with the characteristics cinematographers have come to know and love now being distributed across a much larger image circle to cover these expanded formats.
The history of these “Movie Roadshow” level formats is fascinating and regularly tied to creating attention that encourages an increase in audience numbers for a variety of historical reasons. Cooke supported these formats as early as the 1950s with their Double Speed Panchros and Duopanchros.
Cooke Duopanchro
Cooke double speed panchro
The 1950s are known as the time of the “format wars” but the first efforts at a wider and larger process date back to the earliest formative years of motion picture production. These attempts were based around large width film cameras and formats in order to achieve heightened clarity and wider aspect ratios. Even as early as 1897 a 63mm wide film process dubbed Veriscope was used to record the famous Corbett-Fitzsimmons boxing prize fight in Carson City, Nevada. The following years would see investment in a variety of short lived but incredibly pioneering formats. This even included ‘Natural Vision’, which saw 63.5mm film being used to expose dual images side by side for larger format 3D.
Studios such as Fox and Warner Bros. had directly competing systems which were met with various levels of audience interest. The onset of the Great Depression took the wind out of the sails of these experiments and the revolution of the advent of sound quelled them even more; theatre owners had to invest in expensive equipment to present “talkies” and there was no interest in spending further to accommodate larger, wider, formats. The global disorder of World War II would shortly follow and put an end to any life widescreen spectacle filmmaking might have still had.
35mm had a seemingly simpler emergence; in 1909 an organisation founded by Thomas Edison, the MotionPicturePatentsCo, declared that 35mm wide and four perforation tall film would be the standard for all production and exhibition of motion pictures in the U.S.A. With “Edison perforations” on both sides of the captured image and the filmstrip running vertically this created an image that was 23.01mm x 17.26mm with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 giving an image area of 397 sq mm.
In 1929 the need to accommodate the soundtrack on the film print created three derivations of the original 35mm format. In 1932 a joint effort by the American Society of Cinematographers and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lead to creation of a new standard – the ‘Academy Standard’. The new frame size was 22.04mm x 16.03mm and formed a 1.375:1 aspect ratio (typically referred to as 1.37:1) with an image area of 353 sq mm which remained dominant until the early 1950s.
By this point the studios no longer owned the theatres and a rise in home television sets saw cinema attendance hit an all-time low. Studios felt the pressure to tempt audiences back to the big screen and what better way to do that than by making the screen even bigger! Earlier widescreen strategies were being continually re-examined and the revolutionary widescreen short ‘This is Cinerama’ only emblazoned this process.
‘This is Cinerama’ premiered in September 1952 in New York City. The Cinerama system utilised a single camera with three individual strips of 35mm film running vertically and simultaneously behind three separate 27mm lenses at six perforations each a frame. The three fields of view that were captured overlapped slightly and then for exhibition each strip was run in a separate projector to present an ultra-wide presentation of 2.59:1. The camera was incredibly bulky and the projection system complicated which in turn limited the film to playing in only four cities but it showed to continuously sold-out crowds for over two years. Widescreen presentation seemingly worked, and the Hollywood Studios rushed to capitalise on it.
Anamorphic systems such as CinemaScope became an enduring way to allow widescreen capture and presentation with existing cameras and projectors. The addition of an anamorphot squeezed a wider horizontal field of view onto the same sized four-perforation tall 35mm format which cameras were set up for and then optically desqueezing it at the point of exhibition was possible with a modified projector lens. Theatres were quickly retrofitted with larger screens that supported anamorphic projection and created more spectacle for the audience. To fill these wider screens as soon as possible some studios would project the same Academy 35 1.37:1 frame from productions that shot spherically but with the image cropped top and bottom to create a wider picture. This wasn’t an improvement on image quality but did create a wider picture.
By 1953 Paramount was investigating their own non-anamorphic approach that would still use 35mm film but result in much greater image clarity by increasing the negative area that was used for each frame. Whilst a horizontally-orientated motion picture camera system had been patented in 1921 it hadn’t fully found footing at that time. Paramount acquired a 1926 ‘Natural Colour’ camera which exposed two separate frames of film at the same time and in cooperation with Technicolor they modified this camera by removing the metal that separated the two frames and then rotated the camera onto its side. Dubbed “Lazy-8” each horizontal frame now spanned 8-peforations wide instead of 4-perforations tall and resulted in a 1.5:1 aspect ratio negative area – this was what became known as VistaVision.
VistaVision was much larger than the conventional Academy format and as such not all standard Academy 35mm format lens covered this new format especially wider focal lengths. Whilst some longer focal lengths did have image circles large enough to cover the lack of wider focal length options was a problem. New lenses were soon designed and manufactured for this format and chief among these were the Cooke Double Speed and Duopanchros. The Double Speeds featured an enlarged image circle over their Cooke Speed Panchro sister series which were incredibly widely used in Hollywood already. Four focal lengths were released from 28mm to 75mm which could be paired with existing longer Speed Panchros such as the 100mm Deep Field and 152mm Telepanchro allowing larger format filmmakers the lens choices they needed at the time.
Expanding the canvas didn’t stop with VistaVision. Along with these Widescreen Wars was the evolution of the 70mm Roadshow Presentation. These exclusive engagement films were closer to a night at the opera with much glitz and grandeur. They offered the highest-fidelity experience for moviegoers with vivid widescreen images and multi-track sound. Once again there were competing processes which emerged in the mid-to-late 1950s. The systems would shoot on 65mm wide negative which was created at the behest of Todd-AO founder Michael Todd in 1953 who had produced the European segments of ‘This is Cinerama’ and was inspired to create a competing widescreen system that was “outta one hole” requiring only one camera and projector. These 65mm negatives were then printed onto a positive release print that was 70mm wide, the extra 5mm allowing for soundtrack information. Each frame is five perforations high and when printed had an aperture of 48.56mm x 22.098mm for a 2.2:1 exhibition aspect ratio and an area of 1073 sq mm – over three times larger than Academy 35. Most of these systems were spherical including Todd-AO and Super Panavision 70 which was introduced in 1959. These Roadshow exhibitions dwindled in the subsequent years but have seen a resurgence recently and the idea of spectacle filmmaking being paired with larger-format capture has always endured.
Digital cinema camera took the industry by storm, and it didn’t take long for the cameras to move beyond Super35 sensor sizes with Open Gate modes and “full-frame” sensors becoming commonplace and democratising larger formats capture. 2014 saw the release of the Arri Alexa65 with a sensor that measured 54.12mm x 25.58mm – even larger than the printed aperture of 65mm film. This large imager has shot many Hollywood tentpole productions but lens availability is limited to glass that can cover such a large imager and these options are a lot less plentiful than Super35mm covering lenses or even ones designed for the plethora of “full frame” cameras now on the market.
Whilst the Roadshow movie originating on 65mm capture was the pinnacle of its day it was undoubtedly cumbersome in ways and inaccessible to all but the most established filmmaker. Now with more camera manufactures entering this space there is a resurgence and rebirth of 65mm and related optics which Cooke are excited to support with Panchro 65/i bringing their lineage and experience with this spectacle enhancing format to the filmmakers of today.
