The Brutalist in Vistavision

[Peter Mork]

brutalist.png

That's what it says on the trailer anyway, The three operators in the US who can play that format better dust off your gear.
Yeah, I don't believe it either.
(For those not in the know, Vistavision (the second V in that word is supposed to be a capital, but I don't do camelcase) was a 1950s format that ran sideways 35mm with 8 perfs to get a more-or-less flat aspect ratio with more definition. It didn't last long as far as exhibition goes, still used for special effects, although probably not much these days.)

[Victor Liorentas]

It is however a format The Brutalist and Paul Thomas Anderson's new film are shot in which transfers well to 70mm release prints. I hear The Brutalist looks great in 70mm. I'm curious what possessed them to shoot in Vista Vision over 65mm.

[James Biggins]

II'm curious what possessed them to shoot in Vista Vision over 65mm.

Cost of film stock?

VistaVision does indeed look magnificent when printed up to 70mm.

[Peter Mork]

The ifea was to make a picture that would look good on a really big screen, wide like cinemascope but tall too - that's the Vista part. I don't know why they shot it that way; maybe they just got a good deal on the camera rental, and I suppose 35mm doesn't need to be special ordered. Hey, I just work here. My question is, when is a format not a format - if you shoot it one way but distribute it another way, is it really what it says in the ad? A conundrum that matters not a whit.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Almost every prior VistaVision horizontally shot film was later re-printed to 35 4perf too and if they were lucky 70mm 5perf. Given that I think they can still claim it... especially on the 70mm prints.

We ran the Hungarian Filmlab 35mm Brutalist here for a festival. 1st run of that print. Looked great but 70mm would have looked even better. They were hopeful for a 70mm screening but the print logistics didn't pan out for that date.

Only caveat was they undersized the 1.66 image area in that lab, probably targeting 1.66:1 shown with 1.85 lensing on flat screens without movable masking. A bit of a shame, cause even more of a fidelity sacrifice compared to the 70mm print, which I would assume/hope uses the full frame neight, just not the width. It worked out for us though without panic borrowing, cause we still don't have dedicated 1.66 lenses either. On my wish list.

Certainly did appreciate the 4 6K reels versus a 70mm reel quantity that will rival Lawrence in number.

[Jim Cassedy]

About a month ago, I ran a private screening of the Digital version THE BRUTALIST for
a film booker & programmer early one morning. When I did a quick on screen QC before
the client arrived, I was rather surprised to see the VistaVision™ logo come up on screen
at the very beginning of the movie.

I even grabbed a screenshot:
VistaVision_Brutalist.jpg

This was in a small auditorium, (about 45 seats) where my only masking and projector
preset were FLAT and SCOPE. The BRUTALIST CPL has it as "F-166"

> Next week, we're booked to do another preview screening, but in 70mm.

[Phillip Grace]

For the whole story of Vistavision you should see Martin Hart's American Widescreen Museum website. The Vistavision material starts here: https://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingvv1.htm

Technicolor later refined the process by adding a 1.5x horizontal squeeze to the negative, creating a shooting format from which release prints in any aspect ratio then in demand could be extracted.

One particular advantage of the Vistavision format is that the negative and prints can be handled in any conventional 35mm laboratory. 65/70mm laboratory services were and are only available in a handful of locations worldwide.

Exhibition of 8-perf double frame release prints was extremely rare. The success of the Vistavision format lay in its large format negative area, which was utilized to produce 35mm 4-perf widescreen reduction prints of very high quality.

[Stan Cortbeeck]

For the whole story of Vistavision you should see Martin Hart's American Widescreen Museum website. The Vistavision material starts here: https://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingvv1.htm

Technicolor later refined the process by adding a 1.5x horizontal squeeze to the negative, creating a shooting format from which release prints in any aspect ratio then in demand could be extracted.

One particular advantage of the Vistavision format is that the negative and prints can be handled in any conventional 35mm laboratory. 65/70mm laboratory services were and are only available in a handful of locations worldwide.

Exhibition of 8-perf double frame release prints was extremely rare. The success of the Vistavision format lay in its large format negative area, which was utilized to produce 35mm 4-perf widescreen reduction prints of very high quality.

That website is very interesting. It seems that the last Vistavision film was "My Six Loves" (1963).

https://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/vvlist.htm

[Mark Ogden]

. . . versus a 70mm reel quantity that will rival Lawrence in number.

Double it. 26 reels. It seems odd to me as Lawrence is about the same run time on 13 reels.

https://petapixel.com/2024/10/10/the...hs-300-pounds/

[Terry Monohan]

The ad should say shot in VistaVision shown in 70mm in select theaters. I personally don't care for movies shot in 70mm film flat and not projected on a wide 70mm scope screen. They may look crisp and clear square but It seems like a waste of film width. 70mm / 65mm film was meant to be shown and projected on a wide curved screen like the 1955 'Oklahoma' Todd-AO days.

The last few years a few nitch directors have used 70mm film in a non scope way. They may have been too young to see how nice this 70mm format looks filmed with the full width of a movie theatre screen in a large cinema. So many movie theatres that still can project 70mm film today are small same with the screen size. A big waste of what 70mm can look like projected on a giant wide screen.

[Peter Mork]

Well, you can't dictate these choices. Not every film wants to be wide, and we're seeing a lot more of narrower aspect ratios lately. Is this a waste of screen real estate? That's a matter of opinion.
I'd like to run that 35mm print of Brutalist but our lamphouse quit on me at the end of our run of Oppenheimer. Somehow the power supply is not getting juice -not a fuse. We'll get a tech to check it.
It's true though, I remember when the credits said "filmed in Panavision", it meant just that, but now, not so much.

[Ed Gordon]

The last movie filmed in VistaVision is The Battle of Baktan Cross (2025). The latest use of VistaVision for special effects was Poor Things (2023). Source: Wikipedia

Here is a comment submitted to IMDB:

The film was shot entirely in VistaVision, a widescreen format that runs 35mm film horizontally through the camera to create 8 perforation film frames, twice the size and resolution of standard four perforation 35mm. The film was the released theaters with 70mm film prints. Though starting with Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) VistaVision has continued to see limited use to create high resolution plates for visual effect shots, this is the first American film in 63 years to be entirely shot in the format, the last being One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Director Brady Corbet explained: "It just seemed like the best way to access that period (1950s) was to shoot on something that was engineered in that same decade."

On the debate of the value of 35mm being blown up to 70mm:

The Brake Through

Despite my own luke warm reception to blow-ups, one of them was going to make a big impression on both audiences and the industry. It was M.G.M.’s “Doctor Zhivago”. Although David Lean and Freddie Young had previously shot “Lawrence of Arabia” using 65mm Super Panavision 70 (same as Todd-AO), this time it was only ordinary 35mm anamorphic Panavision. However, it was promoted as a full scale 70mm production and accepted as such by most moviegoers who probably wouldn’t appreciate the difference even if we more passionate 70mm fans explained it to them. Producers too realised that they could give their films a 70mm road show presentation, without the added cost of shooting in a 65mm format. I must have been so put out, I wrote to M.G.M. to complain that the fact it was only a blow-up wasn’t made clear in the advertising. As I now worked at Ealing Studies as a BBC Film Department projectionist, the headed note paper I requisitioned for the purpose helped it from ending up in the crank letter bin. In the meantime, I had fun peeling off the “in 70mm” stickers from the poster, while waiting for my train home.

Some weeks later, I was rather humbled by a reply forwarded from Metrocolor Labs in Culver City. They explained that their aim was always to present audiences with the best possible image. Even if originally shot on 35mm films, a printed up 70mm version, even when shown on a larger screen, is subject to less magnification, resulting in a brighter and steadier picture. The negative, sometimes the original, is enlarged and un-squeezed using a high quality printer lens (Micro-Panatar) compared to the possibly less than perfect projector anamorphic attachment used when showing a 35mm scope print, always now made from a duplicate negative. Not forgetting, of course, the other great benefit of 70mm was its multi-channel magnetic sound at a time when most 35mm prints only had mono optical tracks. This added attraction made musicals like “Funny Girl”, “Camelot”, “Sweet Charity” and “Paint your Wagon” ideal selections for a blow-up. Although not being a great musical fan, seeing and hearing the “who will buy” set-piece number in “Oliver”, helped me to begin to appreciate the advantages of blow-ups. I’m sure I had nothing to do with it, but the posters and ads now more often stated that the film was just “Presented in 70mm”. This would save any “trade description” trouble in the future, although the term was also used for proper 65mm originated films too.

How could you tell it was only a blow-up? Apart from its coarser image, I looked out for the tell-tale signs that it had been shot with an anamorphic lens. One of the clues can be spotted in the out-of-focus areas, where bright points of light turn into ellipses rather than circles (of confusion). Although 65mm Ultra Panavision and Technirama both use anamorphic lenses on their cameras, the lesser amount of compression makes this particular artefact far less noticeable. Perhaps much easier are the process names on the films actual credits. All the 70mm blow-ups retained the original 35mm process used, so simply “Filmed in Panavision” meant it was a blow-up. Sometimes, the advertising material used the description “Panavision 70”. When first introduced, Panavision’s 65mm clone of Todd-AO used this credit, e.g. “West Side Story”, but the prefix “Super” was soon added to differentiate it from the blow-ups and possibly not to be out-supered by Super Technirama!

Source: https://in70mm.com/presents/1963_blo...n/uk/index.htm

[Harold Hallikainen]

I always thought the simplicity of VistaVision over Cinerama was very clever. The mechanical complexity of Cinerama seems hard to justify. But (and I have not looked into this at all), do the three projectors in Cinerama handle the curved screen better than a single projector with a wide aspect ratio (such as VistaVision)?

[Peter Mork]

Well, at the risk of dating myself, you'd probably get a brighter picture with the image divided between three projectors., but there's that seam where they just never quite match up, fudge-factors notwithstanding.
Also Cinerama was intended to be wider. But it failed because pictures like "How the West Was Won" were not especially, what's the word? good. Even when I was 10 I recognized that.

[Jim Cassedy]

<edited> do the three projectors in Cinerama handle the
curved screen better than a single projector with a wide aspect ratio ?

I'm not a big fan of curved screens, if for no other reason than that they basically violate
awholebuncha 'rules' of the physics of light projection. Yes, with an optically corrected
print and a 'perfect' set up, they can give an impressive picture, if you are willing to ignore
bent horizons and other optical unavoidable optical distortions. But, to answer your question-
. . I assume that CINERAMA™️ had less of a problem with the 'curve' of the screen, because
each of the projectors had to only cover a portion of the total arc curvature of the screen.
A single projector & lens would have a much harder time bending light (which doesn't bend)
onto a huge, curved screen, IMO.