Widescreen Worldwide

Examining widescreen cinema as a worldwide aesthetic and industrial phenomenon, the essays in this volume situate the individual expressions of this new technology within the larger cultural and industrial practices that inform them. What Hollywood sought to market globally as CinemaScope, SuperScope, Techniscope, Technirama, and Panavision took indigenous form in a host of compatible anamorphic formats developed around the world. The book documents how the aesthetics of the first wave of American widescreen films underwent revision in Europe and Asia as filmmakers brought their own idiolect to the language of widescreen mise-en-scène, editing, and sound practices. The work of Otto Preminger, Anthony Mann, Samuel Fuller, Sam Peckinpah, Seijun Suzuki, Kihachi Okamoto, and Tai Kato, among others, is addressed.