Simon Daniellou
From the big screen to the home space
What is a film format? Whether on the big screen of a movie theater, on television, or on a tablet, everyone experiences it, without necessarily knowing what terms like Pathé-Baby, scope, IMAX, or 4K mean. The word "format," it's true, refers to distinct and sometimes complex realities.
For practitioners, it can be used to describe types of equipment or analog or digital recording and projection conditions, particularly film gauges, from 8mm, long dominant in amateur cinema, to 70mm, reserved for prestigious productions such as Ben-Hur, Playtime, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or The Hateful Eight. But format is also a reality for the spectator who perceives the visual and auditory specificities of these processes, offering images of varying size and proportion, sometimes close to square, sometimes panoramically wide.
Bringing together contributions and interviews that address formats according to their different meanings, this book aims to offer a journey through the history of cinema that will allow the reader to discover the economic and aesthetic stakes linked to their uses, as well as the impact of their use on the dissemination and appreciation of films.