In 1953, 20th Century-Fox turned America's collective head away from the new national toy, television, and toward a curious sword-and-sandal spectacle called The Robe, presented in glorious CinemaScope. CinemaScope was Fox's copyrighted name for the widescreen process based on the anamorphic system, with which turn-of-the-century inventors tinkered, but which was developed most successfully in the late 1920s by Professor Henri Chrètien--and then, with the advent of the talkie, quickly relegated to obscurity. But, with the success of The Robe, CinemaScope seemed here to stay, and it spawned a number of rival systems including WarnerScope, Techniscope, etc., as well as more versatile improvements on the system such as Panavision. The anamorphic system involves lenses that compress and distort the image during filming, and then spread them out undistorted on a wide screen during projection. When projected, the ‘scope image is about two and one-half times as wide as it is high.
Science/Fiction/Film is presented in cooperation with the Seventeenth International Congress of History of Science, at the University of California, Berkeley, July 31 through August 8, 1985.
