1 The Director of Photography – an overview

180 Practical Cinematography
This might mean more first time film-makers, and even film schools,
could afford to shoot for anamorphic projection – an exciting thought.
Anamorphic
In order to give First World War tank drivers a better view, a French
physicist, Henri Chretien, developed a lens system that was capable
of expanding and compressing the horizontal angle of view. This
developed into a single Hypergonar lens capable of being fitted to a
film camera and a picture, Construire un Feu, was shot in France using
just this one lens. By the beginning of the 1950s,American film-makers
had come to the conclusion that providing cinemas with wider and wider
screens was the answer to getting the audiences out of their houses and
away from their television sets. In order not to increase costs appreciably,
20th Century Fox adopted and developed Chretien’s principles
to produce a range of lenses, of various focal lengths, capable of shooting
a film in a convenient way, on conventional 35 mm film stock but
with just a change of camera and cinema projector lenses.This resulted
in an aspect ratio of well in access of 2:1. This system they named
CinemaScope and it was very successful, being the first worldwide
anamorphic process (anamorphos from the Greek ana � again,
morphos � to form).
The horizontal compression of the CinemaScope format was 2:1.
This gave CinemaScope an aspect ratio, when the 35 mm camera frame
(0.868 in. � 0.631 in.) was expanded by the special lens, of 2.55:1.
Pressure from the cinema owners caused this to be reduced to a standard
of 2.35:1, mainly due to the architectural constraints of many existing
cinemas; this was often reduced still further on showing, for the same
reasons.
Figure 20.8 shows how the image is managed. The original scene is
horizontally compressed by a ratio of 2:1 by the taking lens. This is
then contact printed without any optical modification. When the print
is shown in the cinema, the projector lens expands the image horizontally
by the same ratio of 2:1 and the image is restored on the screen in
the original height-to-width relationship.
In the early days of anamorphic photography, no compensation was
made in the camera viewfinder and the operator had to compose the
frame with the image compressed to half its actual width. Mercifully,
most modern cameras capable of accepting anamorphic lenses can
also be supplied with a de-anamorphosing viewfinder, so that the
operator can view the image as the audience will see it. That the early
operators could compose such wonderful images with a squeezed
image fills me with admiration.
65 mm and 70 mm
In compressing and expanding the camera image with the anamorphic
process, some horizontal definition is lost. To counteract this, several
companies decided to shoot very wide screen pictures without a
compression lens but using wider film. The Panavision company is
probably the best known of the exponents of this format. Todd-AO,