The 1950s and 60s: the Golden Age of Immersive Cinema - Text 1
The most famous immersive cinema systems came into existence in the 1950s, in the United States especially. During this period, Hollywood was confronted in particular with formidable competition for the big screen: television. To “counter attack,” the film industry strove to be bigger and more spectacular. The famous Cinerama system (the unacknowledged heir of Polyvision) kicked things off in 1952. This process involved shooting with a three-strip 35 mm movie camera, equipped with three 27 mm lenses, and then projecting onto a 146° curved screen using three projectors. Cinerama opened its own movie theatres in order to be able to offer this kind of widescreen projection, with a 2.59:1 ratio (three 35 mm films in a 0.86:1 format projected side by side). True, most Cinerama films (with the exception of How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, released ten years later, in 1962), were primarily tourism films, joining spectacular sequences: Niagara Falls seen from above by helicopter, a roller-coaster ride shot with a subjective camera, etc., as shown in the trailer for the first Cinerama film, This is Cinerama (Merian C. Cooper, Gunther von Fritsch, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Michael Todd, 1952).
In addition, films shot in Cinerama upset established film conventions by radically inverting the codes of film language. In classical cinema, the technical form serves to bring out the content, but in Cinerama the content serves to bring out the form. A true hybrid of conventional cinema and attraction, Cinerama highlighted in an extreme manner cinema’s technological possibilities of the day. Cinerama nevertheless quite deserves its place in the history of immersive cinema, in particular because it was partly responsible for setting in motion the renewed interest of Hollywood studios in widescreen formats. In addition, the Cinerama company later developed a system using 70 mm film, known as Cinerama 70,[1] better adapted than 3 x 35 mm cinema to narrative cinema. This system was used for several films in the 1960s, including Stanley Kubrick’s “ultimate journey,” 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
