VIFF Review: David Bordwell Lecture

David Bordwell is a professor of film studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is here attending the VIFF as a jurist on the Asian film competition. He's also here to give a lecture entitled "The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses! The Aesthetics of CinemaScope" [BORDW]. If I was a film studies student I think I would enjoy his classes. He is an engaging speaker, with a warm manner, easy to understand, and seems to have an enormous understanding of film.

With the help of a slide show (real slides--no PowerPoint!) he explained how the directors of the 1950's adapted to the new wide-screen format of CinemaScope. In an effort to woo viewers away from TV and back into the theatres, 20th Century Fox developed this anamorphic wide-screen system. Because the CinemaScope lens optically squeezes a wide 1:2.35 aspect ratio picture into a regular 1:1.33 film frame it introduces picture distortions. The CinemaScope lens also did not have the deep depth of field possible with normal lenses. Along with the technical issues there was also the problem of composing shots for an almost twice as wide screen.

In time directors and cinematographers developed techniques to minimize the problems and developed new aesthetics in composition which you can see in any modern wide screen film. The tightly framed shots with deep depth of field perfected in films like Citizen Kane did not work with CinemaScope. An early technique was to place actors as if they were on a stage. Another method was to block the wide screen into sections with each a sub-composition. Most innovative was to use the reduced frame height as a restricted window onto the action which allowed for more abstract compositions.

Sadly for CinemaScope it did not survive. Competing system Panavision which corrected most of the technical issues made it obsolete and is used to this day. Now the new wide-screen digital formats may make Panavision obsolete.

Judging by the questions at the end of his lecture there were a lot of serious film geeks in the audience as well as us interested amateurs. The best question was the simplest from an elderly lady who commented on how loud the sound was in the Ontario theatre where she attended the premiere of the first CinemaScope film "The Robe" in the 1953. This launched Bordwell into a lament on how most of the multi-track stereo soundtracks are now lost to us because no machines exist anymore to playback the magnetic tapes. Only the mono optical track embedded on the film remains.

After the lecture the recently restored 1958 CinemaScope film Bonjour tristesse (Hello sadness) was shown. This American made melodrama has a European sensibility. David Niven plays a charming but aging French playboy with a teenage daughter (the elfinly beautiful Jean Seberg) who is far too involved with his lifestyle. There can only be tragic consequences from this arrangement. The present day sequences are in black and white with flashbacks in colour to emphasize the melancholy of their present day situation compared with the happier past. Thumbs up!