American Cinematographer - January 2018 - 22

Oct. '83) and The Wonderful World of the
Brothers Grimm (AC Sept. '62) among them
- but the incredible popularity of the
format's initial promo film, This Is Cinerama,
sent the studios scrambling to create their
own widescreen processes.
Meanwhile, television - which
adopted the 1.33:1 ratio - was becoming
increasingly popular in the United States,
leading the film studios to try an array of
Deep Focus
Super 35
During the "format wars" of the
1950s, brothers Joseph, Irving, Nathan and
Fred Tushinsky proposed what they called
Superscope, which worked with spherical
lenses and made use of the entire negative
area of a frame of 35mm film, without
saving any space for the optical soundtrack
that would be required on the eventual film
print. In post, an optical reduction print
would then be made through an anamorphic lens in order to squeeze the image into
the proper area on the print. Initially this was
done at a 2:1 ratio, instead of 2.35:1.
This format was used on a number of
productions in the mid- to late-'50s, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Vera
Cruz. Later, the format evolved to become
Superscope 235, which cropped a bit more
of the image from the negative to create a
wider 2.35:1 aspect ratio.
The format mostly fell into obscurity
until the early 1980s, when Joe Dunton, BSC
revived it for the documentary Dance Craze.
It was Dunton who dubbed the format
"Super 35," possibly adopting the nomenclature from Super 8 or Super 16, two other
formats that used more film area than their
"regular" counterparts. However, where
Super 8 and Super 16 alter the film itself to
have perforations only on one side, Super 35
retains the standard perforations along both
sides of the negative.
As the Super 35 format "opens up"
the negative area to include the space that's
traditionally left blank for the soundtrack, it
requires the modification of a standard
35mm film-camera's gate so that the image
can fill the full area between the perforations. Additionally, the camera's lens mount
needs to be re-centered so that the image
circle cast by the lens will properly cover the
22

January 2018

techniques - some might say "gimmicks"
- to bring audiences back to movie
theaters. There was stereophonic sound,
3D movies, even William Castle's Percepto,
which fitted certain seats with vibration
devices that would give viewers a sudden
jolt. The only trend that's truly lasted the
test of time, though, is widescreen. In the
1950s, the shape of the movies changed
forever.
larger
area.

During the 10 years following This Is
Cinerama, from 1952 to 1962, more than
20 different film formats competed for
industry dominance. Paramount cropped
off the top and bottom of the 1.33:1 frame
to create the wider 1.66:1 aspect ratio for
titles such as Shane. Todd-AO, a 70mm
format with an aspect ratio of 2.20:1, was
used on features such as Oklahoma!,
Around the World in 80 Days, South Pacific

negative

The thinking was that leaving the soundtrack area blank
on the camera
negative wasn't
necessary, and by
using more negative area, you
could record a
larger image and
optically reduce
the picture later
to accommodate
the soundtrack. Super 35 allowed the cinematographer to expose the full negative
area "perf-to-perf." The 0.980"x0.735"
(24.89mm x 18.67mm) full negative area of
Super 35 is about 30 percent larger than
standard Academy 35; this increase results in
greater resolution and less grain.
John Alcott, BSC embraced the
format and employed it on Greystoke: The
Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (AC May
'84), Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend and
Miracles (1986). But the format really gained
prominence when director James Cameron
chose to use it for The Abyss (shot by Mikael
Salomon, ASC) and on through his subsequent film-shot features.
Early problems with Super 35mm
were that it required the additional optical
printing step to reduce the image to fit into
a proper projection print area; this additional
step reduced the overall image quality.
However, with the rise of digital-intermediate telecine techniques and laser film-recording output capabilities, this step was no
longer necessary; once the negative was
scanned, the image could be resized digitally, without any image degradation, and
recorded back to fine-grain film stocks for
American Cinematographer

subsequent mass contact-print duplication.
Accordingly, Super 35 became increasingly
popular in the 2000s.
The format was also popular for
shooting films that would be released
theatrically in one aspect ratio and on home
video in another. Cameron was a fan of
Super 35 because it negated the need for a
pan-and-scan version; the image could be
composed in-camera for a 2.39:1 theatrical
release that would crop the frame - and it
could be "opened up" to the top and
bottom of the exposed frame to fill a 1.33:1
television screen, without cropping the sides.
This actually meant that video releases
would show more image than was seen
theatrically - provided, of course, that the
filmmakers hadn't let the microphone boom
or dolly tracks sneak into the top or bottom
of the frame!
The bottom line is that Super 35 was
the format that exposed the most area of a
35mm negative, and so it became the de
facto standard to match - or beat - with
digital cinema cameras. Super 35, therefore,
is now a very common category of digital
sensor size.
- JH

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2018