“Spectacular size and complete focus across the screen,” announced a promotional advertisement in 1954. “The ultimate in film presentation that will thrill all your senses and touch all your emotions. VistaVision!”
Developed by Paramount Pictures 70 years ago, the cinematic format tempted
audiences to experience bolder, higher-resolution images in the movie theater. The process was invented by changing how the negative was fed through the camera. Instead of the celluloid strip running vertically – think of a film still with four sprocket holes on each side – the negative was fed horizontally, with eight sprocket holes on the top and bottom. Such as this:
The larger format yielded a richer, more detailed image. Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” and “Vertigo” were among the movies filmed in VistaVision before it lost popularity due to the advance of film stock technology.
“It was one of those formats, like CinemaScope, that was almost designed to draw
audiences back to the cinema just as television was taking off,” said Lol Crawley, the cinematographer of Brady Corbet’s epic “The Brutalist,” the first full American VistaVision feature in more than six decades. “And in many ways, here we are in 2024, putting a movie out there and saying it’s a big experience to see in the cinema. There’s a parallel, for sure, but it was never an affectation or a gimmick for our movie.”
Crawley, whose credits include “White Noise,” “45 Years” and Corbet’s “Vox Lux,” explained that the choice of VistaVision was born from preproduction conversations about architecture. That’s a major subject in the film’s story of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor (Adrien Brody) designing a community center in the 1950s for a Pennsylvania tycoon (Guy Pearce).
“Photographs of architecture often use lenses that preserve the angles and undistorted lines of the buildings,” Crawley said. “And VistaVision creates a wider field of view and a higher resolution. So when Brady mentioned it as a way to celebrate architecture and to support the story, it felt perfect.”
But it wasn’t easy. Crawley only had one VistaVision camera or the whole shoot and insisted on extra preparation time with it. His team included technicians who had worked with cinematographer Robbie Ryan on last year’s “Poor Things,” which used the format for a few select shots.
The cameramen tested the format in London before the film’s six-week shoot in Budapest. The included a Steadicam operator – a brazen sign of just how ambitious Corbet’s intentions were, considering the weight of the VistaVision camera and the way it massively shifts bearings as the film runs through it.
The vast majority of “The Brutalist” (its runtime is three hours and 35 minutes with an intermission) was shot in VistaVision, Crawley said, with the exception of a few longer oner shots. Because of the switched orientation, 1,000 feet of film runs twice as fast through the camera, meaning that one magazine of celluloid can only shoot for about five minutes.
Moviegoers have experienced VistaVision since its Hollywood heyday, but somewhat unknowingly. It was used sparingly in an arena where crisp, high-resolution images are most critical: big budget sci-fi and action films such as “Jurassic Park” and “Inception.” Crawley, in fact, first encountered the format in a galaxy far, far away. “
I loaded a VistaVision camera on “Phantom Menace,” the Star Wars film, where I was a technician,” he said. “We had one from Industrial Light and Magic and I remember it looked like a big blimp on a tripod. It’s quite different and more complex than a regular camera. One time, we turned it on and it started chewing up the film and just kept chewing.”
It wasn’t until he worked on “The Brutalist” that Crawley embraced the uniqueness of VistaVision for dazzling wide-angle tableaus and intimate close-ups. “I have worked with Brady for three movies, all shot on film, but when we did this, I really saw the potential, photographically, of this format,” he said. “I think it’s an incredibly successful piece of cinema and storytelling.”
The experience excited him to keep exploring large format film stock – he wants to shoot in Imax someday – and he’s encouraged that “The Brutalist” has potentially sparked a VistaVision revival. Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Battle of
Baktan Cross,” due next year, uses the format.
“Long may this continue,” Crawley said. “The more that directors shoot on film, the more film’s gonna continue.”
This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line Issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
