Widescreen Cinema

"Ladies and Gentlemen: This is Cinerama". With these words, on September 30, 1952, the heavy red curtains in New York's Broadway Theatre opened on a panoramic, Technicolor image of the Rockaways Playland Atom-Smasher Roller Coaster. The cinematic transformation heralded by this giddy ride was, however, neither as sudden nor as straightforward as it seemed. "Widescreen Cinema" leads readers through the twists and turns and decades it took for film to change its shape and, along the way, shows how this fitful process reflects the vagaries of cultural history. Widescreen and wide-film processes had existed since the 1890s. Why, then, John Belton asks, did 35mm film become a standard? Why did a widescreen revolution fail in the 1920s but succeed in the 1950s? And why did movies shrink again in the 1960s, leaving us with the smallscreen multiplexes and mall cinemas that we know today? The answers, he discovers, have as much to do with popular notions of leisure time and entertainment as they do with technology.
Beginning with film's progress from peepshow to projection in 1896 and focusing on crucial stages in film history, such as the advent of sound, Belton puts widescreen cinema into