From Hypergonar to CinemaScope

The French astronomer Henri Chrétien began creating anamorphic pictures in 1905. Anamorphosis is a very old catoptric curiosity, which involves distorting an image and then correcting it using an adapted mirror.

On April 7, 1927, at the Paris Opera, Chrétien attended the premier of Napoléon by Abel Gance. In certain parts of the film, three projectors were used at the same time either showing different scenes in a triptych sequence, or three images joined together to form a panorama, an idea that Cinerama would reuse in 1952.

Chrétien reacted quickly: on April 29, he took out a patent for a filming device capable of producing anamorphic images that could be corrected by a projection lens into a panoramic format on a screen. He even proposed a screen in the form of a Greek cross, allowing images to be projected either horizontally or vertically. The trademark Hypergonar (from the greek huper, beyond, and gônia, angle) was registered on June 9, 1927. The STOP company (Société Technique d’Optique et de Photographie -—Technological Optics and Photography Company) was formed in November for its manufacture. Barely a year later, on October 15, 1928, in New York, Chrétien presented the invention to Paramount. The firm seemed enthusiastic, but in the end did not follow through.

In France, the filmmaker Claude Autant-Lara produced a film using Hypergonar: Construire un feu (To Light a Fire), based on the book by Jack London, with tallscreen and widescreen images.

Filming was complicated, scenes in the snow presented unforeseen difficulties, but Autant-Lara managed to finish the film with the support of the Éclair laboratories. However, by the time Construire un feu was released in 1929, cinema had started producing talking pictures, and the film's run was a failure. Another pitfall: only one Parisian movie theater, the Parnasse Studio, showed the film, for which the adverts announced "Widescreen film, the cinema of tomorrow". But following pressure from the exhibitors' Union, which accused the cinema owner of unfair competition by using a process in his theater that was not commercially available, the film was quickly taken off the bill.

Bernard Natan, the new director of Pathé, used Chrétien lenses to anamorphosize the optical track of 17.5 mm films, and planned to produce several films using this process. A documentary, Une visite aux merveilles de l’Exposition coloniale internationale (A visit to the marvels of the 1931 International Colonial Exposition), was screened in 1931 with two Hypergonars for horizontal and vertical images.

Professor Chrétien presented his invention once again at the 1937 Universal Exposition at the Palace of Light, on an enormous 600 m2 concave screen set up outdoors. A short film, Panoramas au fil de l’eau (Panorama views over the water), by Jean Tedesco, was screened with two twin projectors and Hypergonar equipment. The joins between the images were softened by a jagged overlay. This time there were no vertical shots, but a third projector, placed in the center, allowed images to be displayed in standard format.

At that time, cinema was going through a serious crisis of admissions numbers. In the United States, the big production companies were looking for a way to attract the public to movie theaters: Americans went to the cinema on average 38 times a year in 1946 and only 36 times in 1952. It needed to compete with the televisions that were invading people's homes. Cinerama, introduced in 1952, was an expensive and complicated solution. But Professor Chrétien's process worked; the large-scale panoramic images offered a new type of spectacle.

20th Century Fox, on the look out for new innovations, had heard about the Hypergonar. After a first meeting in Paris in December 1952 between Chrétien and Earl Sponable, the company's technical director, a first agreement was signed on January 12, 1953 with the President of Fox, Spyros Skouras. Sponable then ordered 500 models. CinemaScope was born. The producer Darryl Zanuck was convinced that the French system, renamed CinemaScope on January 29, 1953, would be "Fox's savior". The company used a few old prototypes to shoot How to Marry a Millionaire , and ordered new lenses from Bausch & Lomb (Rochester).

In September 1953, Fox screened the first Scope film: The Robe () by Henry Koster, 35 mm Technicolor. A package was offered to exhibitors: a Scope Bausch & Lomb lens, magnetic MagOptical Stereophonic Sound, curved Mirror Screen, and film with square Fox Hole perforations. Fox recovered from its financial position, and Scope set a new standard in cinema.

In Paris, people were indignant: why was this French invention being exploited by Americans? Chrétien defended himself: he had spent 27 years of his life trying, without success, to promote his process to his compatriots. As the patents were by then in the public domain, several manufacturers produced their own lenses: Jean Placide Mauclaire (Franscope); Georges Bonnerot (Totalvision); André Fougerat (Dyaliscope). In the United States, MGM ordered the excellent quality Super Panatar prism lens from Robert Gottschalk. Other competitors follow suit: SuperScope, Delrama, Vistarama, Techniscope, TechnoVision, PanaScope, WarnerScope, SovScope (USSR), Tohoscope (Japan), etc. The ratio would sometimes change depending on the systems. CinemaScope's was fixed for projection at 2.35:1, after having wavered between 2.55 and 2.66.

In 1955, Fox launched the CinemaScope 55, which used a wide 55.625 mm negative film containing high-definition anamorphosized images. 35 mm duplicates with linear reduction were taken from these negatives along with 55 mm positives for large movie theaters and drive-ins. However, very few 55 mm projectors were manufactured and Fox would only produce two films in this 55 mm format in 1956: Carousel (Henry King) and The King and I (Walter Lang).

New Wave artists such as Truffaut liked Scope as it allowed them to dazzle their audiences. Les 400 coups (The 400 Blows) (1959), shot in Dyaliscope by Henri Decae, used anamorphosis to emphasize the narrowness of Antoine Doinel's apartment. The final scene, when the child discovers the sea, could only have been shot in Scope, according to Truffaut: "A complete view of the world with, on the right, on the left, and in the distance, all of the land, all of the sea, all of the sky".