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 threadYes, *that* dawn personApr 15
@beadsland Anamorphic widescreen and SCART may be useful terms in your search.
Show threadsport of sacred spherical cows

@thatdawnperson

Interesting. So based on what am finding, it may not be that TV stations compressed the films in question, so much as they didn't go to the trouble of uncompressing the already squashed 35mm for broadcast.

Still only finding discussion of the technology rather than the impact of those broadcasts on later art, but at least this provides more insight into what may have been happening at the stations.

Apr 15 at 2:24pmWeb
Show threadsport of sacred spherical cowsApr 15

@thatdawnperson

Confirmed by Andrew:

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