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In the early 1950s, Hollywood introduced numerous widescreen formats in an effort to compete with the rise of television; the thinking was that the spectacle of CinemaScope, Cinerama, and other processes would give people incentive to leave their homes and return to the theater. Now, as exhibitors struggle with the rise of streaming and declining theater attendance, filmmaker Brady Corbet has revived the greatest of all widescreen formats and given today’s audiences the same reason to get off their couches that Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Curtiz, and other premier directors of their era gave in the 1950s.
Corbet opted to shoot “The Brutalist” in VistaVision, a process Paramount Pictures introduced in 1954 with the release of Michael Curtiz’s “White Christmas.” The format’s run was brief but glorious; it essentially fell out of regular use after Marlon Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks” in 1961, but before that it was employed on several of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films (including “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest”) as well as John Ford’s “The Searchers,” Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” and a whole slew of visually spectacular Jerry Lewis comedies.
What made VistaVision special compared to rival formats like CinemaScope was its larger negative — around twice the size of a typical 35mm film frame, as the film was run through the camera horizontally rather than vertically. As Margaret Bodde, who works with Martin Scorsese’s FIlm Foundation, told IndieWire, “With CinemaScope, you have a four-perf negative. VistaVision is eight-perf, so you’re doubling the size of the image. It just has a superior image quality.” In spite of that superior quality, VistaVision ultimately became more or less obsolete for feature film production, though it continued to be used extensively for special effects work.
Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley brought VistaVision back into use for “The Brutalist” in what is much more than a mere case of celluloid fetishism. Aside from the increased detail provided by the larger negative, VistaVision perfectly expresses the philosophical ideas at the core of “The Brutalist,” particularly the juxtaposition between minimalism and maximalism that characterizes both the architecture created by the title character and the style of the film itself. As Crawley told IndieWire, one key advantage of VistaVision was that its wider field of view meant the filmmakers could capture expansive architecture without resorting to distorting wide-angle lenses.
“The best way to photograph architecture is with rectilinear lenses that don’t distort the buildings themselves,” Crawley said, “so it’s only natural that you would look to a format with a wider field of view.” The real value of VistaVision for Crawley, however, lies in that ability to be both minimalist and maximalist in the same movie. “We use it not only for capturing aspects of the architecture and landscape, but you can also shoot the most beautiful portraits on the format. Essentially you’re encompassing two different things: you have the shallower depth of field of a longer lens, but also the field of view of a wider lens.”
The exhibition format that most accurately renders the images as Crawley and Corbet captured them is 70mm, which is nearly as extinct as VistaVision — though it has seen a resurgence in recent years thanks to the proselytizing of Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson. (Anderson, by the way, shot his upcoming “The Battle of Baktan Cross” in VistaVision.) Tarantino’s own Vista Theater, easily the best first-run venue in Los Angeles, will host a 70mm run of “The Brutalist” starting December 19, and New York’s Village East Cinemas will do the same on the East Coast. Both houses will give attendees limited edition collectibles, but the real prize will be getting to see “The Brutalist” as its makers intended.
Distributor A24 says more 70mm bookings will be announced soon, so keep your ears — and eyes — open.
English (US) ·