Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

View film

VistaVision was developed by Paramount Pictures as a non-anamorphic widescreen format alternative to the anamorphic CinemaScope format innovated by Twentieth Century-Fox. Though its projected image was not as wide as CinemaScope’s picture, VistaVision offered the possibility of considerably greater depth of field –the ability to maintain sharp focus from near the camera to far in the distance–because its negative was twice as wide as the CinemaScope negative. While the technology of the VistaVision process has been explained in detail in the literature, there has been negligible discussion of the potential aesthetic uses of VistaVision’s exceptionable depth of field. The set design and staging of “The Tin Star” (Paramount Pictures, 1957), a Western directed by Anthony Mann, demonstrate the dramatic possibilities of filming scenes built around the depiction spatial depth in which actors move toward and away from the camera, rather than laterally. Expansive views of the town visible through the sheriff’s office’s large windows are filled with carefully staged incidental action that brings the town to life. Confrontations are staged with great distance between actors in the foreground and background. The effect can be quite dynamic, as in the nighttime sequence set in the sheriff’s office that begins with the shades drawn. A rock thrown through a window causes the shade to roll up, revealing a crowd in the street that is threatening to storm the jail in order to get a prisoner held there. My presentation demonstrates how well “The Tin Star” realizes the remarkable spatial potentialities of VistaVision film making.