Word: wide-screen
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...piece band blared Give My Regards to Broadway. Limousines glided up to the theater on 800 sq. yds. of red carpeting. Unlike the Emmy and Oscar awards, which grind on endlessly, honoring the best stunt man to fall off a burning building in a foreign independently produced black-andwhite wide-screen musical comedy, the $450,000 Tony spectacular restricted the on-camera awards to just twelve categories, devoted the rest of the time to full-dress performances from the four best-musical nominees...
...when he needs dramatic intensity, a standard TV technique for "grabbing" the audience. Although close-ups can be an extremely effective dramatic device (see Hitchcock's Sabotage at Harvard Film Studies this fall), they are rarely as effective when the film is in Panavision, a wide-screen process with a 1 to 2.5 screen ratio. Wide-screen has plagued directors for more than a decade; Fritz Lang says it's only good for filming "snakes and funerals," and Hitchcock doesn't like it because you can "always trim the sides off." In any case, TV filming has little relation...
...politely avoid mentioning that Mr. Kozintzev composes for wide-screen as if it were small, sometimes filling the side quarters with people or walls so that he's left with a small screen to compose on in the middle. But let us land on three of his gross blunders--one frequent. That one is the swerving track inward, which he uses as an illiterate uses exclamation points. It makes you feel like a lame third-baseman charging a bunt...
...some of the noisiest slaughter scenes ever filmed. It took 70,000 gallons of water a day just to keep the cast from evaporating, and United Artists sent enough medical equipment out on location to serve a division in Viet Nam. Nonetheless Khartoum is not just another exercise in wide-screen warfare: emphasizing subtlety rather than savagery, it convincingly retells the story of a complex military hero who died in one of history's more fascinating lost causes...
Something for everyone here. Camera-conscious film wonks, alert to Cinema History, will notice something new in this use of Cinemascope: it seems uniquely uninfluenced by Hollywood wide-screen, model of New Wave Americanophiles like Chabrol and Vadim. Bunuel's vision of provincial France seems rather an extension into modern times of the native Renoir tradition of lighting and composition...