
Every time a smaller screen becomes commercially available, some news story comes out about how said smaller screen is affecting how people create for motion picture arts. The latest one I heard was on NPR's Morning Edition on 1/27/09.
In case you don't feel like listening or have something against NPR, it's a story about music video directors who are tailoring their work for the tiny screens on the devices we carry in our pockets. More close ups and fewer long shots, quicker edits to keep the viewers attention, center framing. After listening to it I started thinking about how the movie industry responded to the birth of television in the early 50s. They didn't make their films smaller, they made them BIGGER and w i d e r. The idea was to give people something they weren't going to see on their television sets. So we wound up with epics in Cinemascope, Superscope, Techniscope, VistaVision, etc. (Widescreen existed before television, but was rarely used between 1932 and 1953.)
The results of going widescreen were not always good. The first film released in Cinemascope, The Robe (1953), is unwatchable, unless you're a seven-year-old Catholic boy and it's 1968. But 1954 saw the release of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and that, my friends, is a film I could watch until the cows came home. Curiously, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was shot in both a widescreen version and in the then standard 4:3 ratio. It was released only in widescreen but the other version is available on the DVD release. Why anyone would watch it, though, is beyond me. So there's proof, if proof was needed, that format has little bearing on quality of content. This may be a newsflash to some people out there with cheap HD cameras or cellphone cameras making what they are certain will be the next Sundance megabuzz sensation. (Do you read Doonesbury? Have you been following Alex and the making of her documentary with her cellphone? It's funny stuff, and spot on.)
What concerns me is that something vital may get lost if all of our images are sized for the tiny screens on our phones. I believe the human face is the most compelling and evocative thing one can look at, but that doesn't mean I want to see nothing but close ups of human faces. Other things like landscapes and architecture kind of have their place, too. Even The Passion of Joan of Arc took a break once in a while from Jeanne Falconetti's wondrous face; a breather is necessary. (See the comments on When You Make a Biopic of My Life, Focus on This Moment.)
So, what do you think, will visual story telling suffer, because of these small screens? Or are my concerns unfounded? After all, though our handheld devices are getting smaller, our home televisions are getting bigger and clearer. Some folks I know have bigger screens in their living rooms than Film Forum has in its theaters. Will specialized content eventually be produced for these smaller screens, as it was for television?
Or is this happening already? Do you use your small screens to view certain things (a cinematographer friend told me his iPhone is perfect for watching South Park on planes), and your bigger screens to view other things (an animator friend marveled about her new HD TV and how she could practically read the spines of the books when she watched Law & Order)? Clearly, I have a lot of questions. Do you have any answers?
(Thanks to Peter LaMastro for telling me about the radio segment. I was sleeping at the time.)