Anamorphic widescreen, wide-gauge 70mm and state-of-the art digital projection, these were but a few of the joys I’ve already mentioned in part 1 and part 2 of my report on Bradford’s wonderful Widescreen Weekend way back in March, but there’s one other aspect of what one might term as expanded cinema that the city’s National Media Museum is particularly well suited for serving up, namely multi-screen cinema, the subject of this long-overdue final installment. On top of boasting the UK’s first ever IMAX screen, the venue also plays host to Europe’s only functioning Cinerama system – in fact, the only regularly-programmed Cinerama screen anywhere in the world opened here back in June 1993 in its Pictureville theatre. Not only do we have the fully louvred curved screen, but also original carpets and fixtures and fittings acquired from a now-defunct Cinerama venue in America.

A peak into the Pictureville's projection booth through the Cinerama window.

What better way to celebrate then than with the restored 3-strip version of the first Cinerama fictional feature, How the West Was Won, an epic Western released in 1962 with sequences directed by Hollywood veterans including John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall. I’ve actually rather a soft spot for this admittedly rather bloated and bombastic cinematic spectacular, since I first caught it on the rather wonderful Blu-ray release that came out in 2008. For those not within travelling distance of a Cinerama screen (ie, most of the world), it is the only way you’ll get to witness the film in a manner at least approximating the way it was meant to be seen, with one of the versions on the disk emulating the wraparound curved screen effect.

An image from the Blu-ray release of How the West Was Won (1962) emulating the curved screen effect of the original 3-strip presentation, although without the visible join marks between the screens.

This episodic intergenerational story of wild west pioneers whisks you from era to era with all the monumental extravagance of a James Michener novel and boasts some truly wonderful sequences such as a bison stampede and a gunfight on top of a runaway train, all staged so that the viewer feels central to the action. It also features an all-star cast including James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Debbie Reynolds and that George Peppard fellow. Yes, it is overblown and triumphalist and incredibly long, as well as rather one-dimensional in its politics compared with other Westerns of its era, but it is still a lot of fun, and I lapped up the chance to see it in the manner it was originally intended. Sir Christopher Frayling was at hand to provide a thorough introduction to the film, which should be appearing on the in70mm.com website at some point, along with all the rest of our introductions.

Not just the original projector and screen, the Pictureville also boasts an original Cinerama theatre carpet!

For me however, this three-panel presentation was a mere taster for the topic of Sunday morning’s highly elucidating onstage discussion between Thomas Hauerslev and Stanley Long about Circlorama Cavalcade, a British production made with the intention of filling all eleven screens at the 360° panoramic Circlorama Cinema that some of the audience members remembered located in Piccadilly Circus for a brief period of little more than a year back in the early 1960s.

Stanley Long onstage with Thomas Hauerslev at Bradford's Pictureville.

Perhaps Circlorama might be considered a precursor to the curved dome of the IMAX screen. Its antecedents stretch right back to the origins of cinema, but the first real commercial endeavour was the 9-screen Circle-Vision 360° or Circarama system that Disney opened in a number of its theme parks in the 1950s. Circlorama had an even more immediate ancestor in the form of the Circular Kinopanorama system developed in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, which as I mentioned in my own introduction to Dersu Uzala, can still be experienced in the All-Russia Exhibition Centre in Moscow, built in 1959 (unsurprisingly, the in70mm.com site also features a page devoted to this system, which will certainly be top of my tourist agenda should I ever visit Moscow). The London attraction was a venture between Leonard Urry and the Russian entrepreneur Leon Heppner, who’d been based in London for several years before deciding that introducing the Russian system might be a lucrative commercial proposition – although ultimately he was proven wrong. We were all given a handout of a magazine article from the time (I still need to chase down a reference for this) extolling it’s virtues:

“Eleven screens surround a circular auditorium, the perimeter of which is 150 feet, and the eleven films making up the wrap-around picture are projected through small portholes on the side masking of each screen. The films, each of 35mm. width, are shown by Philips FP 20’s, which are spaced equi-distantly around a “gallery” surrounding the circular auditorium. All the projectors are electrically synchronised, and all are started and stopped from a master control. Adjacent to each machine is the pulsator unit. A nine-channel magnetic sound system feeds fifty-one speakers situated behind the screens, in the ceiling and under the floor.”

Original ad for Circlorama Cavalcade.

Stanley Long’s part in the story begins when he was called in by Urry to provide a film for the system. By his account, the Russian film that was playing there, Russian Roundabout, was failing to pull in the London crowds, so he was hired to make something with more local interest, which is how Circlorama Cavalcade came about. The result film, which clocked in at just under 30 minutes, was actually shot on 16mm in the end, and the number of soundtracks reduced to three from the original nine, all for budgetary reasons. Its contents sound rather familiar for a film of this type – a trip down the Thames and other London landmarks interspersed with performances such as a scene with circus lion tamers (shot on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, apparently) and a live concert in the Empire Leicester Square from the 60s Merseybeat pop combo The Swinging Blue Jeans. You can read a lot more about the production in a full interview with Stanley Long on in70mm.com. I have to say, I found the talk a fascinating one, albeit rather tantalising – even if there were the facilities to show the film in Bradford, all the prints were lost after the Circlorama company went bust shortly after it was made.

Stanley Long recounts the story of Circlorama.

Incidentally, if the name Stanley Long sounds familiar, it is because in later years he became more associated with a richer vein of cinematic showmanship that proved rather more lucrative to the British film industry, shooting and producing such landmarks of UK tit-and-bumillation as Naughty (1971), Eskimo Nell (1975) and Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976) and its variants. I made sure I picked up a copy of his autobiography X-rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker, co-written with Simon Sheridan, which he was signing after the talk, which also includes some information on Circlorama Cavalcade – essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in the history of UK film exhibition.

X-rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker, Stanley Long's revealing autobiography.

I’ve covered what were for me the most interesting aspects of Widescreen Weekend 2011, but there was plenty else on offer. Not only was it an education into aspects of film history, exhibition and production that I was not familiar with, nor just a chance to catch up with familiar, much-loved titles on the grandest scale imaginable. There were also some genuinely wonderful discoveries to be had, and I was amazed by the passion and knowledge of everyone involved in the event. For someone whose formative years of cinephilia were instructed by home video, it really brought home the kind of thrills and pleasure that cinema used to provide to audiences, and maybe still can. I for one am really excited about returning in 2012, and can’t urge enough anyone reading this to do likewise.

Posted at 15:07 on 26 May 2011 Filed under news.

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• Cinerama
• Circarama
• Circlorama
• Circlorama Cavalcade
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Well it’s back to reality with a bump, having wended my weary way home on a series of slow trains back to London after a long weekend ensconced in Bradford’s National Media Museum for Widescreen Weekend, a celebration of cinema history’s biggest and boldest of spectacles held annually as part of Bradford International Film Festival. Daylight has been a rare commodity these past few days, with most of the films as long as they are wide: the first film I saw, for example, Dersu Uzala, clocked in at a relatively modest 144 minutes, a running time which had expanded to 162 minutes by the next day’s 3-strip Cinerama presentation of How the West Was Won and reached its apogee on the Saturday night with Lawrence of Arabia hitting whopping a 222 minutes. This left just about time between screenings or during the intermissions in the lengthier titles to grab a quick bite and a coffee and a lungful of fresh air, but it did mean I managed to pack a whole host of memorable, novel and diverse viewing experiences into my brief spell in Bradford: anamorphic widescreen and wide-gauge 70mm, state-of-the-art digital restorations and last but not least, 3-strip Cinerama presentations, of which I’ll write more later (although I should take time first to emphasise that not only are Bradford’s projection facilities second to none, but that the Pictureville boasts the only Cinerama projection facilities in the whole of Europe, and with the two Cinerama screens in the US (the ArcLight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and the Seattle Cinerama) apparently in semi-retirement at the moment, is apparently the only continuously functioning Cinerama cinema anywhere in the world.

Bradford's National Media Museum. with the only continuously functioning Cinerama screen in the world and much more besides....

One always comes away from festivals having spotted themes and relationships between films, filmmakers and national cinemas one never saw before. In this instance it was the Soviet connection that stood out for me, with a very British picture based on an internationally-bestselling Russian novel (David Lean’s languorous 1965 adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago), a more genuinely Russian production directed by a Japanese director (Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala) and a fascinating onstage discussion with a British filmmaker known for his skin flicks recounting the bizarre story of how a 360 degree panoramic cinema system known as Circlorama developed in Russia ended up in London’s Piccadilly Circus in the early 60s, and his role in the production of its main presentation, Circlorama Cavalcade – but more about this particular  bizarre piece of lost history in a later post… On another note, two of the titles screened, How the West Was Won and the 70mm presentation of 1965 British war film Operation Crossbow (directed by Michael Anderson from a script by Emeric Pressberger) served to remind those of us in the audience of the generation who grew up with The A-Team (a distinct minority at this particular festival, I’ll grant you) that George Peppard was actually once a major screen idol. But it was the closing screening of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, presented with its 4-track magnetic soundtrack cranked up to eleven, that in a relatively succinct 95 minutes, for me pretty much encapsulated what the whole thing was about – that films are really meant to be experienced sitting in the dark, with a full audience, with as large a screen and as loud a sound system as possible, to get their full effect. My perceptions finely honed by Argento’s sensual shocker, I emerged after the screening into the dark Bradford night as if reborn.

Sensory satiation in Suspiria

All of the titles screened here were made to be shown large – not on laptops, not on iPads, not on cellphones. Indeed the bulk were made in an era when TV broadcasts were low-res and monochrome and films had to be chopped up into little bits using pan-and-scan techniques just to fit them into the smaller and narrower frame for home viewers. It was, after all, the introduction of the smaller, more intimate rival of television that led to the cinema screen’s increase in size and width and additional sound channels in the first place. As such, the primacy of the films’ presentational aspects made for a rather different festival experience than usual, one as much predicated on all-immersive sensory overload as championing technology and mourning forgotten formats from the analogue age.

Sadly, my travel arrangements meant I had to miss Operation Crossbow and the final screening of the festival that followed it, Blake Edwards’ The Great Race (1965), not to mention the first film of the weekend, the East German production Goya – Or The Hard Way to Enlightenment (Konrad Wolf, 1971), for what might very well have been its first ever UK screening. I was up in time for Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, USSR, 1975), however, which I was scheduled to introduce, although there was a brief few moments of panic when it seemed that the screen might not be ready for either me or the film. The motor that raised and lowered the main flat screen in front of the louvred Cinerama one had temporarily jammed, and no one seemed sure if it was possible to fix it before How the West Was Won was to be shown on the curved screen the next day. It seemed a little ironic, I thought, how a cinema capable of showing almost every single projection format ever created could find itself stimied by something as a fundamental to the process as the screen, but fortunately the problem managed resolve itself and the screening went ahead as planned.

Dersu Uzala (1975), presented in Bradford in Sovscope 70

I won’t go into detail about Dersu Uzala here as my introduction will soon go up on the website in70mm.com, a wonderful resource edited by Thomas Hauerslev. What I will say however is that compared with the various DVD releases that have been released (which are assessed by DVD Beaver here), this rare large screen airing on a 70mm print loaned from a private collector was an absolute revelation. If you look at most online reviews, the general consensus seems to be that the film is a trifle boring, a sentiment I indeed myself shared to some extent beforehand, having only experienced the old Kino release. The truth is, unlike many of the widescreen films from this era, whose images were composed with the fact that ultimately most people would experience the film on TV, this is a work that screams out for the full-scale theatrical presentation, preferable 70mm, with its recurrent scenes of its characters in wide shot mere pinpricks against a vast and imposing landscape. So many of the subtle details are lost on even the largest modern-day flatscreen TVs, such as the scene where Arseniev and Dersu are darting around the frozen lake, panicking when it becomes clear that night is closing in, bringing a howling blizzard along with it, and parts of their icy path back to shelter are not strong enough to hold their weight. I consider myself very privileged indeed to have been party to this extremely rare presentation in the form it was originally intended.

One of the many startling shots in Kurosawa's Soviet-shot epic.

This attention to forms and formats was particularly notable with the three films by David Lean that showed at Widescreen Weekend, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Bridge On the River Kwai. I have to confess, I’d never actually seen the first two of these, and it was for this very reason: I’d been waiting till the opportunity to experience them on the big screen rather than just tick them off the box on TV or DVD. As it turns out, with Lawrence of Arabia, I ducked this very opportunity I’d been saving myself for, too tired and hungry to face a full four hours at the end of the Saturday. I did catch Doctor Zhivago, however, and as sacrilegious as it might be to say it, I found its 197 minutes an awful bore. Magnificent production design aside, it was a pompous, ersatz and soulless piece of filmmaking, and the casting was about as convincing as Joyn Wayne’s turn as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956). No, I prefer my Russian epics to be made by Russians, like the multi-part 1960s Sovscope 70 production of War and Peace I’ve mentioned in a previous post (available on UK DVD here). Bridge On the River is another kettle of fish entirely, one of the finest British films ever made, not to mention one of the finest war films too. It’s 161-minute running time just flew by, and the introduction by Sir Christopher Frayling was informative and just as entertaining.

One of British cinema's finest hours, Alec Guinness in David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

The reason for this Lean overload was that the David Lean Foundation have recently treated the director’s films to new 4K digital restorations, and again, this raised the issue of whether these looked better than the original versions and whether they were authentic to the filmmaker’s original vision. Without getting to deep into the argument here, all formats have their virtues and drawbacks. The lack of such blemishes as scratches and crackles and pops on the soundtrack might result in a comparatively austere, sterile viewing experience for some, but at least the colours won’t fade over the next few decades and with the digital switchover well underway across the cinemas of the world, it’s a sad reality that there’s considerably more possibilities to screen films digitally than from 70mm prints, which hardly any venues are left capable of showing.

It’s an issue that seemed particularly pertinent with regards to one particularly title that screened on Saturday early evening, for the first time in 30 years. For me, Dance Craze was by far and away the standout surprise of the festival, a screen epiphany whose tragic disappearance from public consciousness is almost entirely attributable to the fact that the only screening copy available in this country is in 70mm. I’ll write more about this amazing time-capsule in my next post on Widescreen Weekend.

Posted at 14:32 on 29 March 2011 Filed under news.

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• Bridge on the River Kwai
• Cinerama
• Circlorama
• Dance Craze
• David Lean
• Dersu Uzala
• Doctor Zhivago
• How the West Was Won
• in70mm.com
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Operation Crossbow
• Suspiria
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Event: Widescreen Weekend 2011

Where: Pictureville Cinema, National Media Museum, Bradford BD1 1NQ

When: Fri 25–Mon 28 March 2011

“Come and see Cinerama and 70mm in all its splendour. We will include new 4k DCP prints of classic widescreen and large format films, as well as a mix of new and old 70mm prints, from the vaults and collectors alike, in its 70mm curved screen splendour.

Join Sir David and Col. Nicholson, the Prescotts and Dersu to see the whole wide world in breathtaking letterbox format. Feel the Russian cold, Jarre’s classic tunes, Varykino’s real estate and a hot day on the job for an English map maker in Arabia, while not minding of course. Dance craze to the ska beats of the 1980s and push the button on the curve with Max. Get a black and white Wise scare-o-rama, while you enjoy a Goodwin orchestrated German rocket science blow-up and a DDR large format interpretation of a Spanish painter in ORVO color.”

How the West Was Won, playing in Bradford in 3-strip Cinerama on the curve with 7-track magnetic stereo with introduction by Sir Christopher Frayling

The Pictureville Cinema in Bradford is the only cinema left in the world outside of the United States capable of showing original 3-strip Cinerama.

Films showing at this year’s Widescreen Weekend include: Operation Crossbow, How the West Was Won, The Dark Crystal, Bridge on the River Kwai, The Lion in Winter, The Great Race and Goya.

I’ll be introducing the screening of Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala , in Sovscope 70, on the Friday.

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Posted at 14:04 on 25 March 2011 Filed under events.

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• 70mm
• Akira Kurosawa
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