What is CinemaScope?

What is CinemaScope?

CinémaScope is a widescreen film process by deforming the image using an anamorphic lens.

CinémaScope was originally developed by the French inventor Henri Chrétien in the mid-1920s, using a lens used in aerial photography. It was used for the first time by the film industry in 1953 by the Century Fox for the Peplum Tunic and for the musical How to Marry a Millionaire. The French director Claude Autant-Lara had used the goal of Chrétien since 1928, but if this technique experienced such a boom in the 1950s, it was primarily to stop the competition of television by offering "spectacular" cinema.

The CinémaScope technique required the use of two particular objectives: the first ("anamorphic"), attached to the camera, allowed the image to be narrowed on the tape, and the second, identical, placed on the projector, was used to enlarge the film on the screen.

Later progress made it possible to reduce the anamorphic image to a standard 35 mm film. The term "scope" became synonymous with "widescreen", while other studios were developing competing systems, with similar names: Agascope (Sweden), Alexscope (Argentina), Camerascope (France), Dyaliscope (France), Superscope (United States), Techniscope (United States), Sovscope (USSR), Tohoscope (Japan) and Totalscope (Italy), among others.

Neither the CinémaScope nor its improved version, CinémaScope 55, nor any of its variants survived the birth of other widescreen systems, although the Super-Panavision 70 was used remarkably for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), directed by David Lean. VistaVision, a non-anamorphic lens of a smaller field than the CinémaScope, operated using two 35mm boxes instead of one and was used for the first time by Paramount in White Christmas in 1954.

For most projections, the two boxes were superimposed on each other, which gave an extremely detailed image.

Multicamera systems, notably Cinérama and Cinémiracle, disappeared in favor of single-film systems. Of these, Panavision, a 35 mm anamorphic system, has replaced CinemaScope and is today the most widely used widescreen technology.