QRF 22(1) #14683
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 21:131–147, 2004
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 1050-9208 print/1543-5326 online
DOI: 10.1080/10509200490273116
Looking at the Wider Picture on the Small Screen:
Reconsidering British Television and
Widescreen Cinema in the 1950s
SU HOLMES
Aesthetic and technological comparisons between film and television have historically
favored the cinema, constructing a dichotomy based on many essentialist claims about the
media (McLoone 1996: 81). This is particularly so with respect to the 1950s, where the
established historical narrative surrounding the relations between cinema and television
pivots on a technological contrast between the big screen and the small. The standard
conception here is that, in a bid to “rekindle interest in the movies, Hollywood adopted
the adage ‘we’ll give [the audience] . . . something television can’t’ ” (Balio 1990: 23).
In seeking to emphasize the visual and technological limitations of its small screen
“rival,” the general consensus is that cinema sought to reinvent—or at least enhance—
its specificities by exploiting innovations such as color and widescreen. The interaction
between the film and television industries since this time, primarily from the 1960s
onwards, has of course also lead to the screening of widescreen films on television.
Fuelling claims about the aesthetic “incompatibility” of the media (Maltby 1983, Neale
1998), this has largely confirmed perceptions (and prejudices) surrounding television’s
longstanding “deficiencies as an exhibition site for film” (Klinger 1998: 4). Yet with
the advent of digital technology and widescreen TV, it is possible that some of these
“deficiencies” may be partly appeased—thus marking a break with the tensions of the
past (see King 2002: 238). As Steve Neale suggests:
Until the recent advent of widescreen television, itself a sign of the synergy
that now exists between film, television and video industries, the proportions of
the television screen and all widescreen formats were significantly different—
which of course was one of the reasons for Hollywood’s adoption of widescreen
formats in the first place (Neale 1998: 130).
In offering a more complex assessment of television’s impact on the composition
of the widescreen image, Neale demonstrates the need for further research into the
contemporary aesthetic interplay between cinema and television. Yet this presents us
with a trajectory in which the more recent technological convergence between film and
television marks a deviation from the dichotomies of the past, particularly, it would
seem, when it comes to the “definitive” period of the 1950s. In this respect, it is worth
emphasizing William Uricchio’s suggestion that “the disjunction between our collective
memory of a simple media past and the demands of our more complicated present may
The author wishes to thank Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond for their helpful comments.
Su Holmes is a Lecturer in the Department of Media, Arts and Society at Southampton Institute, UK. Her
articles have appeared in Screen, Historical Journal of Radio, Film and Television, and The Journal of Popular
British Cinema. She is the co-editor of the volume From Here to Reality: Reality TV and its Contexts.
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be more apparent than real, in which case there remains much to be learned from a new
look at the past” (1998: 118). It is such a “new look a the past” that I am interested in
here, specifically with respect to the 1950s.
My aim here is to question the argument that television was simply the negative
“other” against which the cinema defined its technological rejuvenation in the 1950s.
Despite the revisionist work on the early relations between cinema on television (at least
with respect to the American context) (Hilmes 1990, Balio 1990, Anderson 1994) as
well as the expanding scope of TV “archaeology” more generally, it is striking that
this particular perception remains unquestioned. The suggestion that the cinema sought
to separate itself from television—whether in terms of technology or shifts in content,
which pushed the boundaries of film censorship—clearly offers an extremely persuasive
and logical argument. Yet given that revisionist approaches to history have foregrounded
the gaps and ruptures in our knowledge and criticized the totalizing coherence of “grand
narratives” (Sobchack 2000: 301), this very simplicity should also alert us to potential problems. The argument that films separated themselves from television plays up
conflict between individualized industries and media forms—a structure that obscures
the possibility of their interaction. Drawing on archival research, my aim here is to
complicate this narrative by considering television’s role in the promotion of color and
widescreen film in the 1950s, specifically as a result of the new genre of the television cinema program. Although focusing primarily on the British programs, my analysis
takes in both the British and Hollywood film industries, and their role in this early
symbiosis.
The discussion surrounding the shift to widescreen film, and its subsequent suffering
of various “indignatories” when broadcast on television, foregrounds the extent to which,
as Barbara Klinger comments, “for most of the cinemas existence, scholars have analyzed
the medium almost exclusively as a phenomenon of the big screen” (Klinger 1998: 4).
Klinger goes on to describe the critical and methodological tensions presented by the
televising of the feature film:
The feature film in broadcast form exists in an apparent aesthetic no-man’s
land, presented in a diminutive surrogate medium that lacks the panache and
authenticity delivered by the original celluloid version. Neither strictly cinema
nor strictly television, the domesticated feature film is a hybrid form that falls
between the analytical cracks (1998: 4).
While the cinema program both past and present might equally be said to “fall
between the analytical cracks” of film and television studies, existing as it does at the
intersection of both media, this description is particularly apt for considering television’s
early role in the promotion of widescreen technologies. Representing neither simply the
“primitive” monochrome aesthetic of the small television screen, nor the spectacular
“cinematic” exhibition of the early widescreen film, this interaction sits at an intriguing
intersection of the early relations between film and television and significantly, the critical
histories through which they have been understood. At a time when the cinema was
deliberately negotiating a boundary struggle in its cultural role as screen entertainment,
how did television play a role in circulating this new identity, and to what extent does
this demand a reassessment of conventional narrative outlined?
Without wanting to endorse an economic determinist argument, it is generally agreed
that it was predominantly economic imperatives which prompted Hollywood to increasingly adopt color and widescreen technologies in the 1950s as a bid to stem the decline
in audience attendance which, in the US, had dropped from a weekly figure of 90 million
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in 1947, to 51 million in 1952 (Maltby 1995: 156). Although, as Maltby notes, CinemaScope was not “a piece of technology that had sat on the shelf for 25 years, waiting for
a suitable set of economic circumstances” (1995: 156), but rather also relied on post-war
technological developments in areas such as sound, film stock and exhibition materials,
widescreen innovations were nevertheless developed in their basic form decades before
(see Belton for more on this). It has also economics which have often fuelled convergences between film and television (Hill, McLoone 1996: 2)—something which is of
considerable importance in reconceptualizing their technological and aesthetic relations
in the 1950s. While these innovations may have been an attempt to foreground the “specialness of cinemagoing . . . [in] stark contrast to the banality of staying at home and
watching the ‘box’ ” (Macnab, 1993: 211), cinema could equally not afford to ignore the
promotional possibilities of the small screen. Economic imperatives created a situation
in which the bid to distinguish film from television—to construct a “different exchange
value” for the cinematic product (Anderson 1991: 87)—was also a strategy in part dependent on television for its circulation. In fact, this is surely just as logical as the argument
concerning film’s differentiation from television. If widescreen and color were to lure
audiences back to the cinema, then it was necessary to “pursue” them wherever they
had “gone.” This meant addressing the audience in the domestic sphere through what
was rapidly becoming the dominant site for the consumption of screen entertainment: the
television.
Thus, the explanation that Hollywood sought to “lure people from their TV sets”
(Balio 1990: 23) is in many ways entirely correct, only we also have to acknowledge
that television played an active role in this process. Rather than simply representing the
competition, television was also to function as an agent of “enticement,” discussion and
promotion where these innovations were concerned. Given that such aesthetic advances
in the cinema were simultaneously designed to compete with the new medium, this
created a fantastically contradictory situation which emerges from the unstable, yet
growing, partnership between cinema and television at this time. Part of the problem with
previous accounts is that issues of technological difference between film and television
are abstracted, isolated, and wrenched from the wider consideration of their aesthetic
interplay in these early years. My aim here is thus to situate them within the wider set
of discourses which structured developing perceptions of the media, both with respect to
their interaction in the cinema program and more broadly.
These relations between cinema and television emerged from the wider significance
of the televised cinema program in the 1950s. In comparison with revisionist work on
Hollywood which has emphasized how cinema and broadcasting were “interlocked both
economically and textually for decades” (Anderson 1991: 85), not only since the 1950s
but right back to radio in the 1920s, the relations between cinema and television in
Britain have not been the subject of a similar reappraisal. It is clear that the different
institutional and economic structures of British cinema and broadcasting did not enable
the same degree of industrial symbiosis between the media as occurred in the US. Yet
the prevalence of the cinema program on 1950s British television—particularly the series
Current Release (BBC, 1952–53), Picture Parade (BBC, 1956–62) and Film Fanfare
(ABC, 1956–57)—substantially complicates the conventional perceptions of hostility
between British cinema and television at this time, which have largely pivoted on the
film industry’s refusal to sell any feature films to television (Buscombe, 1991).
From the start of Current Release in 1952, both British and Hollywood companies
became increasingly accustomed to using television to promote their films, whether with
excerpts, star interviews, premiere coverage or “behind-the-scenes” footage. Although often building on strategies developed in other media such as radio and film fan magazines,
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television was nevertheless shaping new forms of coverage within the specificity of its
textual form (see Holmes, 2001a, 2001b). This represented a unique period in the relations between film and television in that the cinema could still be celebrated as (more
of) a mass medium, part of the fabric of everyday life, while at the same time these programs were also exploring and indeed hastening the domestication of film culture. Yet
although the coverage of star interviews, premieres or “behind-the-scenes” footage were
all exploring ways of making film “televisual,” it was around the quite literal interaction
between film and television—the use of film clips—that debates around aesthetic and
technological “compatibility” were played out most clearly.
The importance of film clips here point out the extent to which, because of the film
industry’s reluctance to sell their films to television, feature films were not a prominent
presence on British television until the end of the 1950s, and into the 1960s. As Ed
Buscombe (1991) and John Caughie (1991) have emphasized, however, even if films had
been in plentiful supply, there were also reservations regarding the aesthetic implications
of screening feature films on television. Particularly in the late 1940s and early 1950s
when emphasis was placed on television’s prized qualities of immediacy and liveness,
to screen feature films could be seen as “a betrayal of the new medium’s potential”
(Buscombe, 1991: 201). Other commentators foregrounded television’s qualities of “intimacy,” closely related, of course, to the context of its domestic reception. Television
was seen to require a different “tempo” and cutting rate to the feature film, as John
Swift emphasized in 1950: “The audience, not being a public one, does not relish being
whisked at lightening speed from one scene to the next before the first has been mentally
digested” (187). What we see emerging here is a conception of a televisual address appropriate to the domestic context of viewing. As a result, it was the case that feature films
“did not simply represent the technologically or institutionally unattainable for television,
but also the aesthetically undesirable” (Caughie 1991: 32). While we might suggest that
the insistence on television as primarily a live (and here also “intimate” and domestic) medium derives from the type of essentialism I am in some sense questioning here,
such perceptions have been considered increasingly crucial to understanding the development of television and the early expectations within which this occurred (see Barr 1996,
47–75).
Thus, precisely because feature films were in short supply, it was also around the use
of film clips in the cinema program that these debates about the “appropriate” aesthetic
relations between film and television were played out. This began when the film industry
and the BBC began to negotiate over the content and presentation of the excerpts in
Current Release. The BBC were amazed when, in discussions over the new series, the
film industry suggested that the Corporation simply screen the commercial film trailers
used by exhibitors in cinemas (5 February 1952. Meeting between BBC and film industry.
T6/104/2 BBC Written Archive Center [WAC]). Quite apart from this representing direct
advertising (the promotional implications of the film program consistently raised problems
for the BBC), these trailers were clearly considered too loud and “fast-paced” for the
televisual aesthetic.
Indeed, as a former head of BBC Television, Maurice Gorham, specifically mentioned
the film trailer when questioning the general suitability of domestic film consumption:
“The stridency of musical openings to many films would blow viewers out of their
armchairs, and it is hard to imagine the typical film trailer, all explosions and superlatives,
raising anything but a laugh in the home” (1950: 31). Furthermore, the BBC equally
felt that the “TV excerpt” should offer a clear segment of narrative interest—unlike
the deliberately incoherent and fragmented rhythm of the trailer. Evident here is the
extent to which the BBC and the film industry had conflicting investments in the cinema
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program. The BBC’s priorities lay with entertainment and the “public service” function
of the series, while the film industry naturally viewed the program as primarily a
promotional tool.
While these debates cannot be discussed in detail here, by 1956 and the emergence of
series such as Picture Parade and Film Fanfare, it is evident that the film companies had
developed a more “appreciative” understanding of what were perceived as the developing
specificities of TV as a medium. In discussing Picture Parade’s preview of the new
Paramount film The Proud and the Profane (1956) starring William Holden and Deborah
Kerr, the Daily Film Renter noted that:
The chat between the two stars was nothing short of dynamic, with Holden
obviously out to seduce the widow. This short clip was perfect TV. It was also
the sort of thing that will tantalize viewers and make them want to find out
whether or not Holden was successful! (7 September, 1956: 3).
What the Daily Film Renter conceptualizes as “perfect TV” here appears to be the dynamism of the emphasis on “talk.” This may again play into the essentialist perception that
while the cinema is about the scale of visual spectacle and “action,” television is “essentially a talking heads medium” (McLoone, 1996: 81). Yet the importance of emphasizing
this here is in setting a context within which to consider the relations between television and color widescreen cinema. If there were still reservations regarding the aesthetic
suitability of screening feature films on television, in the context of which an emphasis
on the discursive was seen as providing “perfect TV,” then how did CinemaScope, with
its bid to foreground the splendor and scale of visual spectacle and stereophonic sound,
quite literally “fit” into this image?
Given that CinemaScope did not emerge until 1953, just after Current Release
went off air, discussions surrounding the essential “incompatibility” between film and
television initially focused on the increasing use of color film. In the early 1950s,
Hollywood’s production of color films jumped from 20% to 50% of total US output
(Balio 1985: 425), while the British industry’s take up of color was slower and more
sporadic. In contemplating the appearance of such films on the cinema program, Kine
Weekly emphasized the film industry’s concerns over their products facing the “disability
of being ‘boxed up’ in black and white . . . and viewed by the light of the flickering fire”
(4 January, 1952: 2). These concerns simultaneously emerged from the protracted debates
concerning the sale of full-length feature films to television. As John Davis, Managing
Director of the Rank Organization explained: “If televised, feature films will lose much
of their quality and definition and in fact give the impression that feature films are not
good” (quoted in Macnab, 1993: 201). It was clearly perceived that, when screened on
television, films simply promoted cinemagoing more generally.
This view was again in evidence in Kine Weekly when the BBC’s Philip Dorte
attempted to convince the film industry of the merits of broadcasting feature films: “[We
are] now showing some very old feature films on television. This will remind the public
of what the kinema has to offer” (17 December, 1953:6). Interesting in this respect is
the extent to which, while innovations such as color and CinemaScope were intended
to emphasize the shift to the “event” status of cinemagoing and the specificity of the
individual product, the above conception constructs filming as a habitual, indiscriminate
pursuit: the “poor” appearance of a film on television—even films from decades ago—
is seen to offer a “bad advertisement” for the cinema in general, although we might
note that this was at the beginning of the decade when the decline in cinema admissions
was less steep (Stafford 2002: 99). The stakes, then, were surely far higher where the
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promotion of the current film was concerned, and the suggestion that such coverage might
be counter-productive was repeatedly raised.
At a meeting between the BBC and the film industry in May 1952, three months after
Current Release began, the minutes record an objection from the film companies that:
not sufficient emphasis was put on the fact that a film was in color, and in
consequence the public might miss the announcement and consider the quality
of the extracts rather poor. [The producer] Mr. Farquarson-Small took note of
this, and stated that he would do all in his power to ensure that adequate emphasis
was given to these announcements (13 May 1952. Notes on meeting between
BBC and film industry to discuss Current Release programs. T6/104/2. BBC
Written Archive Center [WAC]).
And indeed he did. The 1950s British cinema program constructed an intriguing, semifictional aesthetic in which the sets were designed to simulate film studios (including a
cutting room and projection room), cinema foyers, theatres and “studio” offices. These
were treated entirely as though they were real, and were originally conceived by the
BBC as adding “variety and verisimilitude to the general magazine content of the series”
(although the film industry and the viewers often complained that they did just the
opposite, perceiving the set-up as less “realistic” than stagy and intrusive) (BBC Viewer
Research reports, Current Release). Within this context, the film industry’s insistence that
the presenter take due care to emphasize the status of the color films was approached in
a rather interesting and theatrical manner.
In the first two editions of the Current Release the presenter, John Fitzgerald,
introduced the films from the studio “office,” complete with a young female “secretary”
named “Susan.” According to the scripts, Susan was to interrupt his commentary—while
looking over his shoulder—with such remarks as: “You won’t forget to say it’s a color
film, will you John?.” It is perhaps not only from a retrospective point of view that this
strategy appears extremely self-conscious. It served to emphasize the perspective that
the BBC were very eager to please the film industry, an attitude which, in view of the
promotional content of the program, often lead the press to claim that the cinema series
was simply a bargaining tool to appease the film industry, with which the BBC hoped
to receive feature films in return. While this was certainly not the case (not least of all
because the televised cinema program extended a tradition of film coverage that already
had a 30 year history on BBC radio), the BBC did see the series as functioning as a useful
bridge in aiding more amicable relations with the film industry on a wider scale. The
presentation of the color film indicates a heightened awareness of the cinema program’s
role in this respect, while simultaneously exemplifying the very newness and fragility of
these relations at the time.
In assessing these relations, it is important to stress that in the early 1950s, it was not
necessarily clear how the relations between cinema and television would pan out—that
the advent of television would ultimately play an important role in hastening the decline
of the cinema as a mass medium. As John Swift’s book Adventure in Vision explained in
1950: “Television is going to do something to the cinema industry as a whole; exactly
what, nobody can yet tell” (206). The media nevertheless experienced their early coexistence surrounded by a thick discourse foregrounding their competitive dialectic. We
might expect this in the film industry’s trade press, for example, (which played a key
role in seeking to boost the morale of the film industry where television was concerned),
but we only need look at the more popular context of Picturegoer film fan magazine to
consider its wider circulation.
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Picturegoer maintained a contradictory and complex relationship with television
throughout the decade in which it had to negotiate its allegiance to film culture, without alienating a readership who were increasingly becoming as much TV viewers as
filmgoers. The magazine demonstrated a liberal and progressive attitude to the new
medium in the early 1950s by incorporating regular columns such as “TV Enquiry
Service: The office answers . . . thirty-five thousand film queries per year, and it is
now fully geared to tell you all you want to know about the personalities appearing
on BBC television” (31 May 1952:18), as well as offering increasing coverage of TV
names.
At the same time, the magazine published articles deliberately playing up the antagonism between the media—a context which of course also produced a framework
within which readers would write in to the magazine to debate the future of cinema
and television. Distancing the reality of a struggling film industry in the British context (as well as expressing a broader ambivalence over the “Americanization” of British
film culture), a favorite discursive strategy of Picturegoer was to hold up the example
of Hollywood—where the expansion of television was more rapid and its inroads into
cinemagoing attendance more acute—as evidence of the new medium’s implications for
the cinema, and its wider impact on cultural life. While reporting on Hollywood’s “decline,” readers are also warned of documented cases of “TV neck” and “slot TV” (“with
movies piped into the home”) as unbelievable “horrors” which could soon beset the
British population (31 August 1957: 14).
In the early 1950s it would seem that this heavy discourse of competition—so prevalent in other contexts—is the “unspoken” in the cinema program. It silently surrounded
its rhetoric and address, providing a perspective against which it was keen to foreground
amicable relations with the cinema. The discursive construction of color films can be
seen in this context. In fact, the film industry’s concern regarding the extent to which
TV viewers may consider the quality of the film clips “rather poor” is in some sense
at odds with the wider discourse of competition. If film industry marketing strategies
were increasingly differentiating film from television, then audiences—while certainly
new to television—were surely able to make this distinction when the clips appeared on
the small screen. Nevertheless, this precisely encapsulates the contradictory position and
strategies of the film industry: the desire to distinguish the cinema from television in a
struggle to redefine its boundaries, yet the simultaneous impetus to use the new medium
in order to promote this shift. These contradictions were undoubtedly intensified with the
institutionalization of widescreen technologies.
Although there were a range of widescreen processes in use in the 1950s, it was
Twentieth Century Fox’s CinemaScope that became most widely adopted by the Hollywood film industry, until it was eclipsed as a special event at the end of the decade
by formats such as VistaVision and Todd-AO. Spyros Skouras, President of Twentieth
Century Fox, took the decision to push the adoption of CinemaScope as a way of saving his company’s declining fortunes which, unlike the more short-lived “gimmicks” of
Cinerama and 3D, was perceived as the system “best suited to regularly turning out the
more expensive pictures necessary to reverse the decline in box office receipts” (Balio
1990: 27). Existing work on its establishment in Britain has tended to emphasize the
wrangles over exhibition—the reluctance of the Rank Organization (owning the Odeon
and Gaumont cinema chains) and small exhibitors to make the expensive changes necessary to screen CinemaScope films with stereophonic sound (Murphy, 1992, Macnab,
1993). Despite these problems, by the end of 1955 more than half the cinemas in Britain
(with nearly three-quarters of the seating capacity) were equipped to screen widescreen
films (Murphy 103).
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Much less has been said about the British film industry’s adoption of widescreen at
the level of production. Although color was used for many British films in the 1950s,
it was, as indicated, still usual to shoot them in black and white, as well as “flat,” a
practice that continued well into the 1960s. Nevertheless, the British industry clearly
experimented with CinemaScope and other widescreen technologies, early examples
being Anatole Litvak’s The Deep Blue Sea (1955) and Powell and Pressburger’s Oh
Rosalinda! (1955; both shot in CinemaScope). George Perry describes The Deep Blue
Sea (starring Vivien Leigh and Kenneth More) as an “early casualty of widescreen” in
so far as the “melancholic drama” (set in a bedsitting room) was “swamped” by the new
process and unsuited to its expanding aesthetics (1974: 45).
In view of the fact that the widescreen processes were initially associated with the
large-scale spectacles offered by Hollywood, this was also a recurrent and predictable
response to the British use of the technology at the time. Particularly in terms of
period costume features, biblical epics and musicals, Hollywood genres and budgets were
deemed more “suitable for spectacularization” (Belton 189), although this simultaneously
demonstrates how a particular type of picture is used to construct the aesthetic and
technological relations between cinema and television in this period.
Nevertheless, using a variety of processes ranging from Twentieth Century Fox’s
CinemaScope, Paramount’s VistaVision, to processes such as British CameraScope, SpectaScope and SuperScope, 1956 saw several British widescreen films previewed on the
cinema program, ranging from musicals (Stars in Your Eyes [1956]), comedies (Three
Men in a Boat [1956]) to war films (Battle of the River plate [1956]). While it may have
been the case that British films were seen as less suited to exploitation by widescreen
innovations, that is not to suggest that, with respect to the British box office, the British
film was simply the poor relation of the Hollywood “event.” As Kine Weekly reported
in 1956, “ironically enough some of the biggest box-office winners last year were films
shot in standard ratio and without the benefit of color” (5 July 1956: 28). In 1956 the
top box-office success in the UK was the British Reach for the Sky (1956), the black and
white (“flat”) biopic of Douglas Bader, starring Kenneth More. It is nevertheless clear
that the British film industry’s use and marketing of widescreen technologies demands
further research.
Gomery and Allen explain how new technologies go through a process of invention
(when the technology is designed), innovation (when adopted for practical use) and
diffusion (when this use becomes widespread) (1985: 114). In this respect, television
played a role in the diffusion of widescreen cinema, essentially from the mid-1950s.
Although television’s coverage of film continued in a range of forms after Current
Release ended its run in 1953, the real flurry of activity in the film program began in
1955–6 following the establishment of commercial television in Britain, and the advent
of the second channel, ITV. Existing in a separate economic, institutional and cultural
environment than their precursor Current Release, the two main programs were the BBC’s
Picture Parade and ABC’s Film Fanfare.
Not only had television witnessed an expansion in channels and broadcasting hours,
but up until 1955, the decline in cinema attendance in Britain had been relatively
shallow—with 1952–54 almost showing signs of stability which has been partly attributed
to the introduction of CinemaScope and stereophonic sound (Stafford, 2002: 96). After
mid-decade, the rate of decline accelerated more sharply, particularly between 1957–59,
and it became increasingly evident that the cinema’s days as a mass medium may be
over. The changes in the Hollywood studio system of the 1950s, as well as shifts in cinemagoing habits, are widely known, although it is significant to note just how clearly they
were discussed in the trade press at the time. As the Daily Film Renter insisted in 1956:
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Production is . . . at a point of adjustment. Mass produced entertainment is out;
the highly individualized film is in. . . . No longer does the public regard its
visits to the cinema merely as a matter of “going to the movies.” Instead, it only
parts with its money at the box office to see a tempting attraction. Once upon
a time it was argued that a large part of the cinema’s success was an avenue
of escape from the pressures of the everyday. The modern antidote to boredom
is no longer the movie. It is television. . . . For tingling, stimulating experience
they go to see great pictures (27 September 1956: 2).
While television was not of course the only factor to influence cinema attendance,
but rather also shifts in audience demographics, consumer spending and wider leisure
pursuits, the broader establishment of a second channel in Britain occurred simultaneously
with the cinema’s increasing decline. This context is important in conceptualizing the
television’s discursive construction of widescreen. The advent of widescreen was in itself
evidence of the shifts in cinemagoing and the cinema’s social role, something that the film
program could no longer ignore. For example, Picture Parade’s discussion of Cinerama
in 1956 was introduced by presenter (and British film actor) Derek Bond:
When the post-war boom at the box-office began to wane and the competition
. . . [from] television became more acute, the film industry made a tremendous
effort in new techniques—3D, widescreen, VistaVision and so on. They have
revolutionized the cinema almost as much as the advent of sound. . . .
The introduction to the preview is indicative of the complex and contradictory relations
between the two media, and the economic and cultural contexts in which they had
emerged. Firstly, unlike Current Release in 1952, it is clearly no longer possible for the
rhetoric of the cinema program to ignore the discourse of competitive rivalry between
television and cinema—and the former’s negative impact on the fortunes of the latter.
Indeed, the presenter “narrates” the dynamics of these relations with a clarity and
understanding we would perhaps expect only from subsequent histories of the period,
and the benefit of retrospection. Yet in discussing widescreen’s attempt to draw audiences
back to the cinema when “the competition from television became more acute,” Picture
Parade presents this strategy so casually as to undercut the grand claims of competitive
rivalry. This is reinforced by the extent to which the program positions itself as almost
an objective observer rather than, as a television program, fully implicated within the
situation described. It is from this position that, while clearly less securely than earlier
in the decade, the cinema program continues to see the media as companions rather than
antagonists.
Following the general introduction, Bond goes on to describe Cinerama as “the
new form of entertainment” in which the “all-embracing screen gives a new thrilling
experience.” He then previews the film The Seven Wonders of the World (1956) which
was the latest release in the process (although given that Bond introduces Cinerama as “a
new form of entertainment” it would appear that Cinerama was introduced to the Britain
some time later than in the US, where it had emerged in 1952). In the preview on Picture
Parade, viewers were shown an excerpt from The Seven Wonders of the World which,
like many Cinerama features, was a “sight-seeing excursion” and “compendium of exotic
locales,” visiting places such as the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids and the Leaning Tower of
Pisa (Belton 91). In fact, while it may be the case that television failed to truly offer
the sense that “the all-embracing” Cinerama screen gives a new thrilling experience,“
there is simultaneously a way in which this presentation was entirely in keeping with
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the discourses which surrounded early television viewing. This may suggest more of a
comparison, than contrast, with the discursive construction of widescreen cinema.
Belton has argued that the emergence of widescreen cinema calls for a “rethinking of
traditional models of spectatorship” (185). The aesthetics, but particularly the marketing
of widescreen, was shaped not only by competition from television, as in order to compete
with the proliferation of other leisure activities, films had to redefine themselves as a
“more participatory experience in which they became not so much something people
saw as something they did” [original emphasis] (1992: 95). Cinerama in particular drew
upon the recreational referent of the amusement park, which has numerous conceptual
connections with early cinema. As indicated by the television preview above, this is also
the case with Cinerama’s penchant for “actualities” and travelogues. In its rejection of
character and narrative, the emphasis in Cinerama was on the spectacle of the technology,
and its ability to define cinema as “pure spectacle, pure sensation, pure experience”
(Belton 97). Of all the widescreen innovations, the marketing for Cinerama drew most
strongly on a sense of audience involvement, and adverts promised: “you won’t be gazing
at the movie screen—you’ll find yourself swept right into the picture, surrounded by
sight and sound” (Belton 92). It is in this respect that Belton claims that, in its bid to
aesthetically and discursively define a new viewing subject for the medium, the motion
picture sought a “middle ground between the notion of passive consumption associated
with at-home television viewing and that of active participation involved in outdoor
recreational activity” (1990: 187).
It is unclear on what basis Belton claims TV viewing as “passive” here. In fact,
rather than such strategies “clearly distinguish[ing] cinema from television” (Belton 192)
they actually echo its discursive construction quite clearly. Increasing work on the early
development of television has emphasized the discourses which structured the “televisual
imagination,” and the medium’s technological uses, aesthetic horizons, and appropriate
cultural role (Spigel 1992, Jacobs 2000). Key in all these areas was not simply the
emphasis on television as a live medium, but the ways in which this set discursive
parameters for viewer interaction. As John Corner points out, television’s “combined
advantages over radio (vision) and cinema (liveness) gave a uniquely high level of ‘copresence’ . . . the viewer often being put in the position of witness” (1991: 15). In early
discussions, proposals and patents surrounding television, the metaphors of transport and
travel were often invoked.
As Jason Jacobs notes, early television was promoted in terms of mobility, whether
in “terms of the ‘transport’ of images to the home, to the invitation to journey from the
living room with the broadcasters to distant locations” [original emphasis] (2000: 25).
This sense of an “itinerant” viewer was particularly evident, for example, in discussion
of the live outside broadcast in which the powerful co-presence of the medium offered a
sense of “intense realism” which “cannot fail to grip viewers, who although perhaps many
miles from the event itself, may find themselves clutching the sides of their armchairs
with almost as much excitement as if they were actually present” (Dimmock 1952: 51).
This trope of collapsing distance between viewer and object offered what Lynn Spigel
describes as television’s promise “to bring audiences not merely an illusion of reality as
in the cinema, but a sense of ‘being there,’ a kind of hyper-realism” [original emphasis]
(1992: 14).
Intriguing here, then, is that each medium, in exploiting the technological blurring
of time and space, is described as defining itself in opposition to the other—which in
actual fact results in comparison rather than contrast. Belton’s emphasis on widescreen
engendering of a “co-presence” between spectator and screen, breaking down the traditional “segregation of spaces” (Belton 192), clearly mirrors the tropes used to describe
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early television, in effect drawing on a discourse of liveness. In terms of the cinema,
this in itself was not of course intrinsically new. In his discussion of historically “repositioning cinema and the viewing subject within a field of televisual expectation,” William
Uricchio explains how cinema historians have tended to “flatten the discourse of liveness”
in the development of the cinema (1998: 119), and the extent to which it structured the
expectations within which the medium emerged. As Uricchio notes, the “romanticized
retelling of the ‘Lumiere effect’—an impression of reality so strong that early film viewers allegedly sought cover from images of an oncoming train,” might be seen in this
context. The cinema could not ultimately deliver “simultaneity over distance,” but these
discourses of liveness are clearly re-invoked in the promise of widescreen technologies
decades later.
I am not suggesting here that the experience of early “tele-viewing” and widescreen
spectatorship were in actual fact “really” the same. Rather, it was that—in jockeying for
a place in the ongoing redefinition of screen entertainment in the post-war period and
its shifting relations with public and private spheres (see Spigel 1992)—the discursive
construction of cinema and television in some ways converged, rather than diverged. In the
face of the emphasis on “essential” technological differences, it is worth emphasizing this,
as well as Christopher Anderson’s point that “the boundaries which separate the media
in our culture are the products of discourse . . . discourse generated by media industries
. . . and by scholars and critics” (1994: 14). It from this perspective, particularly given
Cinerama’s interest in the travelogue, that Picture Parade’s preview of The Seven Wonders
of the World is in many ways entirely appropriate to the textuality and experience of early
television.
On occasion, however, there was clearly no way to avoid these technological “divisions” between the media—as Picture Parade’s preview of The Windjammer (1956)
makes all too clear. A semi-documentary feature about a Norwegian sailing vessel, this
was a Cinerama-type film shot in the latest widescreen process, Cinemiracle. Picture
Parade presenter Peter Haigh opened the program with the preview:
To start off this week, I’d like to tell you a little about a film that we can’t show
you an extract from, because you’d literally need three television screens side
by side in order to see it. . . . Just to give you some idea of how wide the picture
is, here it is compared with the normal screen [photo caption] that’s the one at
the top—and CinemaScope [photo caption] that’s the one in the middle. It looks
pretty impressive in the cinema—the screen goes right across from one side to
the other. And in order to get such a wide picture they have to use a special
camera, with three lenses working at once, photographing it in sections, so to
speak.
Haigh’s description pivots entirely on scope and size—the width of the screen—and
this is differentiated not only from television, but also from the conventional cinema
screen, as well as CinemaScope. As Belton explains, the three lenses of the Cinerama
camera were crucial in engendering the sense of audience participation. The lenses
encompassed an angle nearly approximating that of human vision, thus reinforcing the
encompassing illusion of three-dimensionality (1992: 92). This, however, also created
problems in exhibition, both in terms of the appearance of seams where the three images
were joined, and in allocating space in the cinema to accommodate the three projection
points. It is thus not difficult to see why the BBC needed to find an alternative method
for previewing a film that they literally couldn’t screen. After the introduction to the
three-lens camera, the viewer is shown a photograph of the “mysterious” technology
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(“It looks pretty complicated to me”), and this is then followed by stills from the film
itself: “[Photo of ship] There she is—and very graceful she looks too. [Photo] That’s
one of the rougher moments when they hit a howling gale in the Atlantic.” Forced to
rely upon the photographic image, television is thus returned to its pre-cinematic state;
the media are so disparate that sharing material is impossible. As the preview draws to a
close the viewer has to rely upon the presenter’s recollection of the event: “The film is in
color and when I saw it at the London premiere . . . it certainly looked impressive. . . .”
A similar example can still be seen later in the decade with Ben Hur (1959) when the
(new) presenter, Robert Robinson, explained that: “we were going to show you something
from the film, but we can’t.” Waving the reel of film in front of the camera he elaborated
that it was simply “too big. We use 35mm, and this is filmed in what is called Camera
65. . . .” Instead, Robinson spoke to the film’s musical composer, Miklos Rozsa.
While in each case specific films are involved, these examples also explore particular
widescreen processes. Yet such cases were vastly outnumbered by the regular previewing
of CinemaScope films. Demonstrating the extent to which, despite their complaints, the
film industry were willing to invest carefully in these promotional opportunities, many
companies supplied monochrome prints of CinemaScope films which offered a better
definition on the television screen. Yet just as with the issue of color films, the film
companies insisted that the programs stress when a film was shot in CinemaScope (or
other widescreen formats) so as not to allow television’s “deficiencies” to obscure this
fact. If such announcements did not occur, the seriousness of the matter would be brought
to the program-makers’ attention. Associated British Pathé, the distribution arm of the
Associated British Picture Corporation, found extreme cause for complaint when Picture
Parade previewed the British comedy, Let’s Be Happy (1957). The Publicity Manager
wrote to the Producer of the program to explain his case:
When it was decided to prepare, on your behalf, black and white films in order
that you could have the most satisfactory pictures, I spoke to your secretary and
asked whether you wished us to supply these in unsqueezed form. I was immediately advised that there was no necessity for this because the new apparatus you
have installed overcomes the difficulty of the CinemaScope ratio. Despite this
assurance, however, I understand that the prints were shown with the top and
bottom of the screen empty. This could have been avoided had we not received
the assurance mentioned above. Finally, no mention was made to the effect that
the picture is both Technicolor and CinemaScope, two refinements which we
consider still have an effect upon the box office (8 May, 1957. Keith S. Allen
to Alan Sleath. T6/405/1. BBC Written Archive Center [WAC]).
The aspect ratio of CinemaScope of course posed problems for television broadcast.
If the full width of the widescreen image was shown, then the top and bottom of the
screen would masked. If the top and bottom of the screen were used, then the sides of
the image would be cropped by up to 50% or more (Belton 216). Yet ABC’s Movie
Magazine (1955–56) on ITV (which subsequently merged to become Film Fanfare) was
very frank about these difficulties, and the presenter, John Fitzgerald, saw it as his duty
to explain the technological conflict to the audience:
For the benefit of new viewers I should explain that to present the . . . shape of
the CinemaScope screen on television we have to have a lot of black masking
at the top and bottom our screens and on the other hand to fill our screen means
clipping a lot off the sides of the movie picture. There is a lot of argument as to
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how this should be done. Perhaps the arguments will be settled one day when
we get elastic television tubes. Meanwhile, we compromise by clipping a little
bit off the sides of the picture and having a little black masking at the top and
bottom. . . .
The presenter appears to acknowledge the heated debates surrounding the film industry’s
concerns over the broadcasting of CinemaScope, while again still refusing to engage
directly with the proposition that cinema and television may occupy an antagonistic
relationship. He presents this as a temporary compromise awaiting technological advancement, while simultaneously a situation (“when we get elastic television tubes”),
that is virtually impossible to overcome.
Belton describes how, with regard to the early 1960s, the major American TV networks did in fact “quickly ‘resolve’ the essential incompatibility between the widescreen
and television formats by deciding to pan and scan (that is, to crop) films rather than
to present them in what was subsequently referred to as the ‘letterbox’ format” (1992:
216). What is interesting here is that British television companies also appear to have
been venturing into technological solutions well before this time. As the letter from Associated British Pathé to the BBC makes clear, there had been talk in 1956–57 about
technological developments enabling the televising of CinemaScope films. In January,
1956, Today’s Cinema reported that CinemaScope films could now be broadcast without
the masking on the TV screen (31 January, 1956: 3). However, given the film industry’s reluctance to sell films to television (and the fact that, unlike the films that were
screened, CinemaScope features would be recent products), it seems very unlikely that
many were broadcast in full at this time. Just before this announcement was made the
CinemaScope film The Black Widow (1954) was in fact screened on ITV. Nevertheless,
this murder mystery (starring Ginger Rogers and Van Heflin) was evidently perceived to
be something of a special occasion, screened as it was during the Christmas period at
3pm in the afternoon. Pioneered by ITV television company Associated Rediffusion, it
is not entirely clear what system was in use here, but it was clear that new strategies
were being considered fairly swiftly.
While television was focused on the long-term possibilities of interaction between
cinema and television, the film companies seem to remain fixated on the construction of a
different exchange value for the filmic product, although this was of course paradoxically
accentuated by the very problems about which they complained: television’s inability
to present the CinemaScope image proper, while clearly heightening awareness of the
film’s release, simultaneously displayed the distinctions between the media which the film
industry were at pains to accentuate. The cinema program operated here through a kind
of double language: it promoted the new processes by insisting on their advantageous
effect on the cinemagoing experience while through this very act—whether with respect
to the appearance of the masked, monochrome image or the dutiful verbal emphasis on
the spectacle television could not display—differentiation was secured.
It would appear that similar issues circulated around the cinema program in the US
context—if the series can be called as such. While it is not possible to consider the
full detail of their development here (see Hilmes, 1990, Anderson, 1994), it is clear that
television coverage about the cinema took a different overall form than that in the UK.
Variety programs such as Toast of the Town (subsequently The Ed Sullivan Show) devoted
considerable space to the coverage of contemporary Hollywood films and stars, but these
were not designated cinema series in the form of Current Release, Picture Parade and
Film Fanfare. Following the success of Disneyland on ABC and its complex use of
programming “as both product and promotion” (Balio 1990: 33), by the mid-1950s the
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major companies began producing series with their names in the titles such as Warner
Bros. Presents, Twentieth Century Fox Theater and MGM Parade (building on coverage
earlier developed for radio).
As with Disneyland, however, the promotion of current releases and other forms of
contemporary film coverage—although the reason for the majors’ involvement with the
series—was only a small segment of the programs, attached as it was to telefilm series,
weekly adaptations of past films or in the case of MGM, an amalgamation of clips from
past and present films (Anderson 1994: 189). Although revisionist work on Hollywood
has focused on the industrial and economic relations which underpinned the series at the
expense of a more detailed analysis of their textual form, the consensus appears to be
that they were not a great success. As Balio explains:
Sponsored by the respective studios and containing commercials for forthcoming
productions, these series represented advertising expenditure and not sources
of profit. And they were not particularly popular. It was not with these selfpromotion vehicles but with the less glamorous television series that Hollywood
slowly came to dominate broadcast schedules (1990: 33–4).
As Balio’s reference to “self-promotion” indicates here, a key issue was what, in
relation to Warner Bros. Presents, Anderson describes as the “overcommercialization”
of the program and the obvious and “incessant plugs for the studio” (Anderson 1994:
196–7). As indicated previously, issues of promotion also provoked tension in the British
context (given that they tested the guidelines relating to “advertising” in BBC and ITV
programs), television nevertheless retained institutional and textual control over the series.
The film industry merely participated in the cinema program, albeit, of course, providing
the vital material. In the US, there was a direct link not simply between the film industry
and television, but a particular studio and the television coverage. This indeed created a
situation where direct promotion was rather more apparent.
This is relevant in terms of assessing the presentation of the cinema’s technological
innovations on television. Existing footage of Warner Bros. Presents going “behind-thescenes” of The Searchers (1956) for example, features presenter Gig Young, persistently
emphasizing the fact that the film is currently “playing in VistaVision and Technicolor
in your local theater.” In terms of its emphasis on the extent to which the film’s aesthetic
splendor may be lost in the technological limitations of television, this is identical to
the British context. The economic and industrial symbiosis between television and the
Hollywood film industry creates a situation in which it is difficult to conceive of Young’s
incessant description as anything other than a promotional diatribe.
In the British context, however, we’ve seen that the discursive construction of both
color and widescreen films functioned as a pivotal site upon which to map the complex
negotiations inherent in the wider, developing relations between cinema and television.
That is not to suggest that such negotiations did not take place in Hollywood, but given
that the programs originated from a particular studio, there is less of an economic, institutional and cultural distance. This greater economic and institutional distance between
British cinema and television made for a more contradictory, precarious and ambivalent
relationship, in the context of which the importance of negotiations surrounding color
and widescreen should not be underestimated.
The precarious nature of these relations was emphasized in 1957–58. In 1957,
Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros., as well as the Rank Organization (the three
companies which, aside from MGM had contributed most to the British cinema program),
announced that they would no longer provide clips for the BBC’s Picture Parade. Warner
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Bros. and Fox claimed that, in view of television’s continued threat to cinema attendance
in the US, this was taken on “orders from America” (29 November 1957. Cecil Madden to
British Lion. T6/360. BBC Written Archive Center [WAC]). Fox and Rank in particular
claimed that their decision was primarily due to the BBC’s inefficiency in screening
CinemaScope films. Film Fanfare had already ceased by this time, and although Picture
Parade (and other) cinema programs continued to appear on British television—and of
course still do today—it seemed that the golden age of the cinema program, in which the
stars and films were celebrated with an extraordinary showbiz glamour and enthusiasm,
was over. The emphasis on CinemaScope as a reason for withdrawing from television
prefigures the dichotomies, which permeate subsequent critical histories of the period.
Does the cinema program demand a reconceptualization of the established historical
narrative concerning the identities of film and television in the 1950s, and the essentialist claims on which they are based? Although emphasizing the cinema’s increasing
dependency on television for its cultural visibility, it is certainly the case that the cinema
program often supported the film industry’s marketing strategies at this time, and their
bid to differentiate cinema and television. Yet what is also clear is that television seemed
entirely happy to occupy this position: although the relations between the media, in the
earlier part of the decade at least, were open to question and not perceived as fixed on a
definitive future course, television had nothing to fear from the cinema. After all, in its
very production, articulation and audience address, the cinema program emphasized that,
despite ventures into such technological appeals, the audience was watching the small
monochrome screen at home.
This does undercut the claims of the conventional historical trajectory in this respect,
precisely because it makes it difficult to see the media as individualized institutions,
structures and textual forms. It is also worth re-emphasizing here that, putting the
technological details to one side, color and widescreen films received an enormous
amount of coverage on 1950s British television, courtesy of the cinema program in
all its developing forms. Particularly notable examples in 1956 were Twentieth Century
Fox’s musicals Carousel (1956) and The King and I (1956)—films shot in the latest
(and short-lived) widescreen process of CinemaScope “55.” Premiere footage, interviews
and excerpts were in abundance on both channels for days, and while the Daily Herald
hailed The King and I as “the real and only true answer to television. It has breath-taking
color, splendid settings, and a glorious sweep, which is going to leave thousands of home
screens idle whenever it’s in the vicinity” (14 September, 1956: 22), it may well have
been the case that television played a role in filling the cinemas in the first place.
It is of course relatively difficult to gauge the effects of their relationship in this respect, although it is worth noting that a survey conducted by Kine Weekly in 1956 reported
that the most frequent factor cited as prompting people to see a film was “film extracts
on TV programs” (13 December 1956: 8). Equally, 88% of patrons questioned indicated
that widescreen innovations had increased their enjoyment of film—the two areas clearly
not being mutually exclusive. This seems important when confronting examples of contemporary convergence between the technologies and aesthetics of cinema and television
which have never, as the cinema program makes clear, been entirely autonomous. We also
know comparatively little about the reception of new cinema technologies—ranging from
sound, widescreen to more contemporary examples such as CGI—given that technological studies tend to concentrate on industry and text, rather than audience. Certainly from
a historical point of view, this is not an easy area to research, yet there are ways of considering the diffusion of technologies in wider cultural and media contexts. With respect
to color and CinemaScope, 1950s television tells us just as much about the circulation
and consumption of cinema as the films themselves or the box office receipts.
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Equally, historical traces indicate that there are further unanswered questions and
avenues to pursue. What is the context, for example, for Picturegoer’s report in 1953 that
a Hollywood TV producer was shooting a series of 3D films for viewing in the home
through 3D glasses? (7 March 1953: 7). Finally, and quite simply, I would question the
conception quoted at the start of this article that color and widescreen simply emphasized
“the ‘specialness’ of cinemagoing . . . [in] stark contrast to the banality of staying at home
and watching the ‘box’ ” (Macnab 1993: 211). Was television in the 1950s—when for
many its experience was still new—ever simply banal? Perhaps not. As one viewer put it
in a cinemagoing survey in The Advertiser in 1957: “My husband has recently bought a
17 television set. With that screen size, you can keep your widescreen films” (9 March
1957: 12).
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