Stretching the Screen: Horizontality, the CinemaScope Film, and the Cold War

• Published in: Quarterly review of film and video Vol. 32; no. 5; pp. 456 - 468
• Main Author: Root, Colin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia Routledge 04.07.2015; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Cold War; Discourse analysis; Motion picture directors & producers; Motion pictures; Narratives
• ISSN: 1050-9208; 1543-5326
• DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2015.994695

To conclude, Hollywood's widescreen technology during the 1950s engaged a series of social, political, and historical discourses that borrowed from the nineteenth century West in order to position itself as a nation during the Cold War. Moreover, the widescreen frame introduced a new visual mode of communication, and fundamentally changed spectatorship by fostering an active, participatory experience at the movies, whereby the viewer's spectatorship was manipulated in a way that emphasized movement across a visual field. Western directors quickly found the widescreen format to be amenable to narratives involving horizontal movement, and the newfound open spaces it offered reinvigorated audiences by aligning such a visual paradigm with their own suburban lives. Yet, the wide-open frame turned out to be as isolating as it was freeing, as characters (and audiences) found themselves trapped in the immensity of dangerous and endless space. More than anything else, widescreen's brief period of ascendancy in Hollywood during the 1950s uncovered the film-going public's response to the Cold War as one of both national cohesiveness and physical separation.