Cinema: Strictly for the Marbles

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"To be overwhelmed by great art is one thing," commented a New York critic, after seeing CinemaScope. "But to be drowned in mediocrity magnified is another . . . What's bad in most Hollywood pictures will be exactly 2.66 times as bad in this."

René Clair, most famous of the French moviemakers, foresaw another consequence of the wide-screen revolution. Quick, frequent shifts from one image to another would be impossible in CinemaScope. The eye cannot take in so large an image in one glance, and the mind is irritated by too rapid change of an image so encompassing that it seems like an environment.

The moving picture may therefore have little motion. The screen will become more like the stage, with the flow of action carried more by the words and gestures of the actors. It will have to become more "literary." Hollywood's actors, accustomed to memorizing one or two lines at a time and saying them just the way the director did, will actually have to act.

The Golden Section. Another tremendous problem introduced by CinemaScope is the question of composition—filling the frame with a satisfying picture. Western art since the time of Pythagoras has sanctioned the esthetic mystery of "the Golden Section." Applied to a rectangle, the rule evolves a geometrical figure about five by three, or 1.61 to 1—almost exactly the proportion of the Paramount wide screen.

Zanuck may argue, in his own defense, that great artists have frequently defied the rule; after all, Michelangelo was said to favor a figure "pyramidal, serpentine, and multiplied by one, two, and three," which is at least as peculiar as 2.66 to 1. Yet only by a master stroke of organization was Leonardo da Vinci able, in The Annunciation, to connect in one esthetic whole a frame that is only slightly more extreme than Zanuck's. But Zanuck of course has a bigger budget. One moviemaker summed up the problem this way: "Marilyn Monroe will have to lie down before the audience can get a good look at her."

In real 3-D, the problems are not so much esthetic as technical, scientific and medical. The object of all good stereoscopy is the fulfillment of the 26th Theorem of Euclid's Optics,* which was paraphrased by Poet-Physician Oliver Wendell Holmes back in 1859: "By means of these two different views of an object, the mind, as it were, feels around it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes as with our arms . . . and then we know it to be more than a surface."

Good for Gorillas. The difficulties of clasping a cinema cutie in this way, without getting a severe eyestrain, have been more than Hollywood can cope with, so far. In the first three pictures, the depth illusion could scarcely have been more cruelly mismanaged if Hollywood had deliberately set out to destroy the eyesight of the nation. For all their skill in 2-D photography, the technicians still knew little about stereoscopy. One expert solemnly told Hollywood that the stereocamera sees things just as human eyes do because its openings are fixed four inches apart—"just as human eyes are"—and its lenses converge on the object of attention. Hollywood accepted this statement literally.