Why this might not seem so easy
“All of Wes Anderson’s films are comedies… and none are.” When the foremost chronicler and advocate of Wes Anderson’s cinema, US critic Matt Zoller Seitz, makes such a sweeping and seemingly paradoxical statement about his subject, the uninitiated Anderson viewer might be forgiven a certain hesitancy to get started. Read more
With his quixotic adventure film Jauja, starring Viggo Mortensen, Lisandro Alonso is the latest filmmaker to ditch the conventional wide-screen format in order to resurrect the squarer ‘Academy’ ratio of earlier times. He’s in good company…
Martin Scorsese’s deft, tautological epithet, “cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out”, typically orbits discussions of subject matter or setting, camera placement or lighting. What’s perhaps considered less of a variable are the actual dimensions of the image: its aspect ratio, or ratio of the width of an image to its height.
Cinema’s early days were straightforward. A 35mm celluloid frame was four perforations high, creating an industry standard ratio of 4:3, or 1:1.33, often shortened to 1:33. When synchronised sound arrived in 1929, dimensions expanded slightly to allow for the optical soundtrack strip, creating a 1:37 aspect ratio. Both of these were folded into one official image size, known as the Academy ratio. Read more