VistaVision!

July 11–Sept. 18

As the marvel of television gripped the nation in the early 1950s, Hollywood studios scrambled to lure audiences back into movie theaters with a plethora of new film formats that expanded the traditional, boxy Academy aspect ratio into wondrous widescreen. But the standard 35mm frame just did not hold up to these new dimensions. Enter Paramount Pictures’ VistaVision format, which oriented the normally vertical film strip horizontally as it ran through the cameras, thereby doubling the picture area and allowing incredible sharpness, finer grain and added detail. After debuting this new format with 1954’s WHITE CHRISTMAS, Paramount utilized it for everything from big screen epics like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and WAR AND PEACE to soaring musicals like FUNNY FACE with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire. Even rival studios boarded the VistaVision train, with Alfred Hitchcock shooting his beloved classic NORTH BY NORTHWEST for MGM and John Ford his enduring western THE SEARCHERS for Warner Bros.; the latter screens in a new 70mm print alongside Hitchcock’s masterpiece for Paramount, VERTIGO. While VistaVision became mostly obsolete by the late ’50s, the format has found a second life thanks to filmmakers like Brady Corbet, Emerald Fennell and Paul Thomas Anderson who have chosen the special format for their latest films, reminding us that the big screen spectacle of the movies is still hard to beat.