Digitisation sends cinema in a whole new direction
In the beginning, it was black and white. Years later, it was colour,
followed by 3D glasses and the Imax. But could the next big development
in cinema be vertical screens?
This weekend, hundreds of film enthusiasts will enjoy a program of 10
specially commissioned shorts on a vast portrait-orientated screen
erected in a contemporary art museum in the Netherlands.
The screenings are part of a "Vertical Cinema" project - including
acclaimed showings last month at Rotterdam's Arminius Church for the
city's International Film Festival. As the name suggests, the Vertical
Cinema project defies the horizontal norm of cinema, and instead opts
for a cinematic experiment designed for a tall, narrow space.
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High drama: Audiences enjoyed vertical cinema in the
Arminius Church, during the Rotterdam International Film
Festival last month |
Lucas van der Velden, a curator for Sonic Acts, which produces the
program, said that the project was attracting attention because "it
makes people rethink cinema, and is a reset for the eyes, ears and
brain". He said "People are excited about it because it's special and
different from regular screenings."
The 10 short films, described as a unique blend of abstract cinema
and structural experiments, are intended to explore the idea that the
format "might well be the crucial aspect of the total audio-visual
experience".
Audiences have been impressed. A critic from the British Film
Institute's Sight & Sound magazine who attended a screening in Rotterdam
praised the "bedazzling intensity of the audiovisual onslaught", adding:
"Some of these works grabbed me by the gut, slapped me around the ears
and did funny things to my eyes before throwing me out of the Arminius
and on to the cold wintry streets of Rotterdam in something resembling a
mild state of shock."
Vertical cinema
Dr Erika Balsom, of the film studies department at King's College
London, will deliver a guest lecture ahead of the screenings at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam this weekend.
She said that the popularity of vertical cinema was linked to
technical developments and the "larger variability of frame proportions
that comes with digitisation" as opposed to previous eras when the
aspect image ratio had to mirror that of the filmstrip itself.
But there are other reasons for the traditional landscape screens.
"Human vision is oriented horizontally. Another factor is that cinematic
aesthetics were inherited from earlier forms, such as theatre, which had
established traditions of horizontal presentation," Dr Balsom said.
"In 1930, Sergei Eisenstein speculated that there was also an
economic factor, claiming it's possible to fit more people in a theatre
with decent sight lines if the image is horizontal."
- The Independent
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