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Spectator And Screen by John Belton is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Spectator And Screen about?

"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 Technicolour image of the Rockaways Playland Atom-Smasher Roller Coaster--and moviegoers were abruptly plunged into a new and revolutionary experience. The cinematic transformation heralded by this giddy ride was, however, neither as sudden nor as straightforward as it seemed. Widescreen Cinema leads us 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 small screen 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 with technology. Beginning with film's progress from peepshow to projection in 1896 and focusing on crucial stages in film history,

Author

John Belton

Publisher

Harvard University, Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies

Published

1991

Language

EN

ISBN

9780674335325