sport of sacred spherical cowsApr 14

Huh.

A #MediaHistory question.

Trying to find scholarship discussing the practice of 1970s/1980s television broadcasters compressing film on the horizontal (for instance, kung-fu genre movies) rather than cropping or letterboxing.

Grew up watching impossibly lanky live-action martial artists on screen, and have a sense that this has impacted the aesthetics of media inheriting from that experience of the genre in latter decades.

Yet am only turning up discussions of the much later transition of television production to widescreen formats. My interest is in how those who grew up with already wide-screen film being squeezed to fit then contemporary television screens... have perhaps reflected that technologically-mediated way of seeing in art thereafter.

Boosts appreciated.

Show threadBob LeFridge  Apr 15

In the beginning, the world was 4:3. As widescreen gained in popularity through the 60s, broadcasters used a technique called "pan and scan". Basically it copied the film through a little 4:3 window, with the operator choosing which part of the image to exclude.

The alternative was letterboxing which looks better and doesn't mess with the director's vision. But people didn't like black stripes on their TVs, so P&S stuck around until the late 80s or so.

@beadsland

Show threadsport of sacred spherical cows

@BobLefridge

Am aware of pan and scan (cropping, selectively) and letterboxing. Both of which are addressed in OP.

Pan and scan requires someone make editorial decisions about what is seen through the window and what is cropped out. Letterboxing was often not acceptable to audiences, as you note.

For Saturday afternoon movies, especially on UHF channels, horizontal compression was a way to avoid sacrificing screen real estate without actually doing any editorial work. Another reply to this thread provides the term "anamorphic widescreen".

The question went to the impact, on later art, of folk growing up with such squashing of film for broadcast. Not to alternatives to such squashing, as if the lived experience of seeing such squashed films on television never happened. A non-responsive answer is non-responsive.

Apr 15 at 2:12pmWeb
Show threadBob LeFridge  Apr 15

Sorry if my answer didn't meet your expectations. I'm speaking purely of my own 45 years experience as a (now retired) film editor in New Zealand and London.

I've never seen anamorphic films transmitted squeezed. Not on a broadcast channel. Indeed, if we'd done that the audience would've revolted because of all the skinny people. Is this perhaps a regional US phenomenon you're describing?

Vaguely related: In the early 2000s I directed a TV series in NZ and had to get written permission in advance from the broadcaster to shoot in 16:9. The images looked fantastic, but the broadcaster chickened out at the last moment and squeezed the ten part series down to 14:9 for transmission, apparently so they wouldn't upset viewers still watching on 4:3 sets.

This possibly goes halfway towards the effect you describe. As someone who knew every frame, I found the effect slightly unnerving, but audiences didn't notice.

@beadsland

Show threadsport of sacred spherical cowsApr 17

@BobLefridge

https://retro.social/@ajroach42/116409462236702732

Andrew (Television Executive) (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I can't recall any specific writing or studies on the psychological or sociological impacts of these choices, but from a purely mechanical perspective it was usually a result of an anamorphic widescreen print being played back without an anamorphic lens. These movies were usually made on super 16mm with a specially designed lens to compress 16:9 framing into a 4:3 frame. That works great when you project it backwards through a reciprocal lens to reproduce the 16:9 framing, and looks funny when you don't. My understanding is that a lot of television networks and VHS purveyors of the 1970s and 1980s chose to show anamorphic stuff in 4:3 instead, not as an aesthetic choice but as a practical one. It was cheaper to do that than to properly pan and scan, and didn't require the specialized lens. It became the aesthetics of cheap, of trash, of Punk. And *that* is something that I could probably point you to more scholarship about if I took some time to dig but don't have anything off hand.

Retro Social