Celluloid Confetti

It was horrible.

Steve Coogan’s giant, lopsided face loomed above me, leering hideously.

But no - this wasn’t some drug-addled night-time catastrophe!

I was sat in my local cinema, watching the opening scenes from Hot Fuzz, and the projectionist had failed to attach the anamorphic lens to the projector.

After, oooh, ten minutes or so (and after several members of the audience had charged out to complain) the problem was rectified and the affable Simon Pegg/Nick Frost comedy rolled on.

But I can’t count the number of times I have been over at someone’s house, sat infront of their shiny television, and encountered the same problem. Not Steve Coogan, you understand - he has problems of his own - but the horror of watching a film or TV show at the wrong aspect ratio.

I’m surprised more people don’t notice when this happen. Many seem to take the attitude that as they’ve paid for the TV set, they’ll make darn sure they use every inch of it, and crouch, spider-like, atop the remote control to prevent my feverish fingers from making the correct adjustment.

Personally, I much prefer the solid black bars of letterboxing and pillarboxing rather than having to see the films I love smeared across a cathode ray tube, or - worst of all - fed through a pan and scan process so the image slides back and forth like some fairground diorama.

Perhaps it’s because I wear glasses; my entire world is bounded by two hoops of green plastic, so I am constantly having to make a decision as which part of reality I should crop out (both figuratively and literally).

So when it comes to buying DVDs, I expect them to show the film in the aspect ratio the director intended. And, by and large, this is usually the case; gone are the days when a well-meaning relative would pick you up the ‘full screen’ version of a film only to have to take cover as you shied it back at their poor confused head.

But the other night, I was reliving my time in ‘Nam by watching Full Metal Jacket on Blu-Ray. And I was horrified when the film started playing in widescreen format!

Sacrilege! As everybody knows, many of Stanley Kubrick’s films (such as The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut) were filmed in ‘fullscreen’ format.

Right?

So what’s the point in releasing a film in High-Definition if they are going to cut chunks out of one of my favourite films? Could it be that some suit at Warners had the temerity to take a pair of scissors to Kubrick just so the film would better show off their HDTV?

Well, as it turns out, not exactly.

You see, there are two main ways to shoot in widescreen.

The first uses an oval anamorphic lens, which horizontally squishes a widescreen image onto standard 35mm film. When the film is projected, the anamorphic lens stretches the picture back into shape.

The second technique uses a circular lens, which captures an un-squashed image onto Super 35 mm film (which is slightly larger than regular 35mm). This image can be subsequently cropped into widescreen by masking the top and the bottom of the frame.

Both techniques produce a widescreen image, but there are some subtle differences.

Using the anamorphic process, specs of light appear oval rather than spherical, and light sources such as car headlamps create horizontal bands of light across the screen (you’ve probably seen this effect a hundred times: this is why).

For this reason, among others, some directors, including Stanley Kubrick and James Cameron, prefer to film in Super 35mm, and crop the footage into widescreen as described above.

Think of all the flickering candleflames in Barry Lyndon, or the sparkling christmas lights in Eyes Wide Shut, and you’ll understand why Kubrick chose not to use the anamorphic process for these films.

(uncharacteristically, Kubrick’s widescreen epic Spartacus was shot using an anamorphic process, 35mm Technirama [see comments below], but the no-less wide 2001 was shot in resolutely non-anamorphic 70mm)

Anyway, these were the days before widescreen tellys adorned every bachelor pad. So when films such as The Abyss were released on VHS or Laserdisc, the transfers were taken from the full-frame negative.

In other words, they kept the parts of the Super 35mm negative that are normally masked out to product a widescreen image.

So that’s why when you see the widescreen releases of certain films, you get the nagging suspicion something is ‘missing’ (as happened to me with Full Metal Jacket).

Well, in a way, something is missing: the top and the bottom of the Super 35 negative. But Kubrick and Cameron always intended their films to be shown in widescreen, and the viewfinders on their cameras were taped off so they could compose their shots accordingly.

Deep down, I still feel a little bit cheated, and I am not entirely sure which version I prefer.

I would have hoped that, when these films came out on High-Definition, both the full screen and widescreen versions would be included on the same disc so we, the obsessive viewing public, could decide for ourselves.

Well, that hasn’t happened with the latest crop of Kubrick releases, but there’s always hope for the future. I really liked the hotel carpet in The Shining and I would love to see it in more detail through the magic of Blu-Ray.

But am I being hypocritical in craving every millimetre of the exposed camera negative, when I chide those who want to put every corner of their TVs to use?

Both of us are, in our own ways, going against the filmmaker’s original vision.

So: which way do you prefer your Kubrick? Full, or Wide?