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 threadAlien_SunsetApr 15
@beadsland @beandreams I wonder if @ajroach42 knows much this?
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)

@Alien_Sunset @beadsland @beandreams 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.

Apr 15 at 3:37pmWeb
Show threadBigHeadModeApr 15
@ajroach42 @beadsland "cheap" and "punk" makes me think to check the old music and skate videos back then. anamorphic lenses may have been part of the style. (see also, fish eye lens http://hrwiki.org/wiki/Fish_Eye_Lens )
Show threadBigHeadModeApr 16

@beadsland "Shared pleasures : a history of movie presentation in the United States" has a chapter on home video. I doubt it addresses your questions, but it might be good to check the bibliography.

https://archive.org/details/sharedpleasuresh0000gome/page/n9/mode/2up

Shared pleasures : a history of movie presentation in the United States : Gomery, Douglas : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

xxii, 381 p. : 24 cm

Internet Archive
Show threadsport of sacred spherical cowsApr 16

@BigHeadMode

TY!

Show threadBigHeadModeApr 16

@beadsland Try to search reaaaaally old Usenet and related (BBS?) posts from like 1985-2000. There might be people talking under the keyword "anamorphic" and maybe a few nuts who know what it is and are deliberately watching squished.

There may be news/trade coverage around the time of the switch, which is going to be lightly documented online but probably well covered in major film research libraries.

PSA: Google Scholar is great if you didn't know.

Show threadsport of sacred spherical cowsApr 16

@BigHeadMode

Google Scholar was getting me nowhere, which is why ended up posting here, as all the articles it was turning up were about the production and distribution processes, where my question goes to public reception and subsequent reverberations in later visual arts.

The switch isn't my interest. The generational imprinting is. Hence the home video angle sounds promising. For instance, have a very distinct recollection of a throwaway gag scene, in latter era nostalgic animated programming, depicting a representation of the live action martial arts broadcasts of the time, with even more exaggerated elongation of bodies on the vertical. This being a semiotic pastiche immediately recognizable to those of a certain generation.

Last century Usenet will be useful to dig into. Though it may be a bit too early for the trends to even have appeared. Folk who grew up watching that stuff had to become established in media industries for the influence to begin manifesting in new media.