Tri-Ocular

How West Was Won.jpgIt's not historically accurate, we all know that now.  But How the West Was Won (1962) is nonetheless historic.  One of the very few feature films to utilize the short-lived Cinerama technology, it is now available on DVD.  And if you have access to the Blu-Ray version shown on a sizable flat screen, you will be in the historic position of watching Cinerama at home.

That is, you will experience something of the eye-popping illusion and eye-crossing headache experienced by the original audiences who flocked to Cinerama in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  The most salient aspect of this is a form of tri-ocular vision.

Instead of using one camera and one projector to create a single focused image on a screen roughly square in shape, Cinerama used three cameras and three projectors to create a panoramic image on a huge wide curved screen.  Audiences felt they were actually in the landscape, as opposed to looking at it.

A similar effect is now achieved by IMax by enlarging the image until it is
picked up by the viewer's peripheral vision.  But Cinerama was weirder than IMax, because it had three different lines of perspective leading to three different vanishing points.

In one famous scene, the characters are in front of a cabin with a road forking off on either side, and your eye tries in vain to follow each road separately while also focusing on the house.  Ouch.

Not only that, but the actors frequently look and talk past each other, because basically they are in separate films spliced together, and the splice is never quite good enough.

All of which makes How the West Was Won utterly fascinating.  And Jimmy Stewart is mighty fine, as always.

Best of all, the DVD contains an excellent documentary about the history of Cinerama, from its origins in World War II as a method to train air force gunners to its flowering during the Cold War as a weapon of mass distraction, and its decline during the 1960s, when powerful directors and actors began to bellyache about the weirdness.


May 8, 2009 7:28 PM |

Categories:

Soundtrax

PRC Pop 

The Chinese pop music scene is like no other ...

Remembering Elvis 

The best part of him will never leave the building ...

Beyond Country 

Like all chart categories, "country" is an arbitrary heading under which one finds the ridiculous, the sublime, and everything in between. On the sublime end, a track that I have been listening to over and over for the last six months: Wynnona Judd's version of "She Is His Only Need." The way she sings it, irony is not a color or even a set of contrasting colors; it is iridescence.

Miles the Rock Star? 

Does Miles Davis belong in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame? Here's my take on his career ...

Essay Contest 

Attention, high school jazz listeners ...

more trax

Me Elsewhere

Edward Hopper 

Painter of light (and darkness) ...

Dissed in Translation 

Here's my best shot at taking Scorcese down a few pegs ...

Henri Rousseau Revisited 

"Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris" appeared at the National Gallery of Art in Washington this fall ...

Paul Klee's Art 

Paul Klee was not childish, despite frequent comparisons between his art and that of children...

Our Art Belongs to Dada 

Rent my "Dadioguide" tour of the Dada show (before it moves to MoMA) ...

more picks

Blogroll

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Martha Bayles published on May 8, 2009 7:28 PM.

The Sands of Judea was the previous entry in this blog.

Dan Brown Redux is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.