> For years I heard people arguing that wider aspect ratios were preferable because they afforded a wider view > Now we're being told the opposite.

I agree with you, but I must also make a special case for IMAX 70mm. It's about the seating position. What we call IMAX 70mm now, was once just "IMAX" and its gimmick was a floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall screen with a relatively close seating position, such that the viewer felt immersed in the movie. Back then it was commonly used for science documentaries where they could soar you over landscapes and in amongst the sea creatures. So this print of The Odyssey is allowing users to enjoy this same gimmick, but with a legit movie. I remember watching an earlier Nolan Batman film in an IMAX 70mm auditorium --while the picture quality was good, it was not shot to take up all the vertical real estate. So presumably they did not use IMAX cameras when filming (just normal 70mm).

As for widescreen, in ye olden times theatrical releases would use it as a gimmick for big visually impressive movies like Lawrence of Arabia. Eventually nearly every movie in the theater used a relatively wide aspect ratio, and as these were converted to VHS and DVD they were commonly butchered into a "full screen" format that erased the left and right part of the image. (They had to slide the view left and right to keep characters on the screen; people called this pan-and-scan.)

There's nothing inherently better about any particular aspect ratio IMO. What's most important is that you are seeing what the director wants you to see.

Aspect ratio by itself tells you very little about the theatrical viewing experience. What really matters is the "angular image size," i.e. the horizontal and vertical angle that the image fills in your field of view. This is determined by the aspect ratio of the image, but also critically the size of the screen and the distance from the screen to the viewer.

1.43 IMAX screens are really really big and fill more of your field of view than most other cinema screens. You can't just look at the 1.43 aspect ratio and say "it's skinnier than 2.39 scope" or "it's wider than 2.39 anamorphic." It would be more accurate to say "in your field of view, it's both wider and taller than most theater's 2.39 anamorphic projection."

This is also why pleas for the 1.43 aspect ratio on home video are slightly misguided. It's not the shape of the 1.43 IMAX image that's so compelling. It's the angular image size! And you probably are not going to view an IMAX film at home with the intended image size. (To be clear, I think it would still be interesting to see that 1.43 image at home, and in VR it's reportedly an excellent experience.)

It can definitely be confusing.

For example, traditionally still film cameras used 35mm film, but cinema cameras also used 35mm film. However the cinema cameras capture the image vertically instead of horizontally on the film, otherwise known as a Super 35. Literally the film runs through the camera vertically instead of horizontally.

In order to make an image work that is understandable to our brains you either need to do heavy cropping and waste tons of film, or you use an anamorphic lens to "squeeze" more light onto the film. You then have to reverse that when you go to project the film.

I think the part you’re missing is the screen size in theatres. I saw The Odyssey in two formats (70mm normal film, and Dolby Cinema).

In both theatres, the screen and image took up the nearly entire height and width of the theatre. The image filled the screen. The 70mm theatre I saw it at had a very wide screen, but not very tall. Filled the wall though

So even if it’s possible to project a digital version in the 1.43:1 aspect ratio, you’d end up with severe cropping on the edges.

That’s not the point of this IMAX format.

The point of this IMAX format is to have a screen that’s literally twice as tall as those normal screens. To accomplish that, you need a really, really big room. Most theatres can’t physically fit these screen sizes. That’s why 1.43:1 IMAX is so rare compared to 1.90:1.

So when you see it in a theatre like that, firstly the image is really big. But the main thing is that the image stretches past your peripheral vision vertically. In fact, at my local one (which recently shut down, no Odyssey), you can’t even see the bottom of the screen, just a slight curve at the edge of the floor. Which doesn’t matter because the image is framed to not put important info there. The point is for the image to be bigger than life.

Showing a cropped version is just not equivalent to that. You could argue that we should have the choice. But I think generally because of how it’s framed, I’d rather it just take up the full size of my TV. So IMAX releases sometimes come out 16:9 instead of cropped top and bottom.

I bet it’s as simple as Nolan just wanting the biggest screen and biggest film negative he could practically get his hands on without inventing a whole new format. I do wonder if we’ll see him try to add anamorphic lenses to 15/70 IMAX at some point to try to make it widescreen again, which would be crazy (in a mad scientist way).

Also, I am kinda frustrated that he pushes for large formats so much and yet lights everything so plainly. I’d love to see him go for a more high-contrast lighting scheme like we saw in typical Hollywood movies in the 80s and 90s.

Don't want to particularly wade into an aspect ratio discussion, but the common thought around the standardization of 16:9 in home cinema/HDTV was due to the aspect ratio of human vision being somewhat of that ratio, due to use having two horizontally-spaced eyes.

You can also watch 1.43:1 in a virtual cinema in VR.

> Now we're being told the opposite.

The choice of unusual film standards has always been to make the film a bit "special" when viewed in a suitable cinema.

The original format 1.33:1 was simply using 35mm wide film (originally 1.35") and after putting sprocket holes on each side, there was 1" of usable width, and someone decided to make a frame 1" x 0.75". The projected image was just scaled linearly.

When they started adding audio, the image was shrunk slightly to 22mm x 16mm (the ratio of this image was modified slightly to 1.375:1), and the audio track was just placed between the right hand edge and sprockets. They could use the same projector technology, just with a mask between the film and the lens so that the audio track didn't appear on the screen, and an optical pickup head for the audio that was placed below the mask and lens.

As an aside - a silent movie projector has a complicated gear system that advances the film 4 sprockets in a jerk, once every 24 times per second, while before and after that it is fed smoothly (so you have a "loop" of film above and below to take up the slack). You also have a shutter that closes for half the frame to hide the film when it's actually moving, and open when it's stationary. When the audio passes the audio sensor after the bottom loop, it's moving linearly, so the amount of light that can pass through a narrow slit is proportional to the voltage sent to the speaker. Later when stereo was added to films, they just fit 2 audio tracks into the space of one, so mono films would work on stereo projectors and vice versa. And even later, Dolby surround was encoded as a dot matrix pattern in between the sprockets (actually, it was just a film ID and timecode that was encoded) and the audio itself came from the 3-5 CDs that came with each film. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

These two standards stuck around for quite a while and then some of the later experimental TV systems started also using this ratio, probably to making filming non-live TV possible / easier as they could use the film process and show it on a TV using a telecine without wasting any of the image space.

Once TVs started to become popular, directors started wanting to make their films more special, something that couldn't be experienced the same way on a TV. And so began the arms race on picture formats. For a while 1.66:1 was popular, which used the same projectors as before but changed out the lens for an anamorphic lens which squished the image to make it wider. And soon, 1.85:1 was standardised (with a different anamorphic lens and mask). This was known as "flat" and was used by the majority of films. Some of the higher budget films were produced in 2.35:1, known as cinemascope or just "scope" and so now most cinemas had 3 sets of masks and lenses - square, flat and scope - and could show pretty much everything with a pair of projectors just by swapping the lenses. A few special aspect ratios were tried, but these were usually limited distribution to specialised cinemas, and cropped to a standard size for regular cinemas. In this era, usually the curtains could move to the correct width for each film, or fully closed.

70mm film has been around for quite a long time, but never really caught on as it was expensive to shoot - non standard cameras, roughly 4 times the area of film (and so at least 4 times the cost, but more because demand was lower), and limited where it could be seen as most projectors were 35mm only. It was possible to get projectors that had a swappable gate so you could also show 70mm film, but they were relatively rare - probably less than 10% of cinemas had these. The aspect ratio was almost always 2.2:1, and so while it was narrower than scope format, people would pay extra for the 70mm experience because of the higher quality (and less grainy look).

In the 1990s, TVs started shifting to 16:9 (1.77:1) which was a half-way compromise between improving the quality for films (1.85:1 scope doesn't need to be cropped much or only has small bars top and bottom) and leaving masses of unused space for older 4:3 TV broadcasts. However 16:9 was never used for cinema, and more directors switched to 2.35:1 for films after that to keep the "better in cinema" quality.

So personally, I don't think 1.43:1 is really any better for 70mm (after all the film is so much bigger, the quality is already improved), rather it's almost certainly been chosen so that it looks different, and much better at cinema. Just as films shown in "letterbox format" on TV with half the screen black looked bad on a 4:3 TV, now pretty much every TV is 16:9, watching a 1.43:1 film on it will have big black bars on the side and detract from the experience. The cinema will be the best place to watch this.

So, IMHO, it's all just a marketing gimmick aimed at those that want to pay a premium to see a film as the director intended it.

Originally a lot of HDTV would present SDTV with black bars on the sides. People don't like it.