The Seoul Cinematheque is running a short 7 film program of widescreen films over the course of five days, Nov. 3 (Tuesday) until Nov. 8 (Sunday). The seven films are: LA DOLCE VITA (Federico Fellini, 1960); YOJIMBO (Akira Kurosawa, 1961); LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (David Lean, 1962); THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967); 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Stanley Kubrick, 1968); ENTER THE DRAGON (Robert Clouse, 1973); and MANHATTAN (Woody Allen, 1979). And before this program begins, you can see another big film at the cinematheque on October 30th (Friday): ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (Sergio Leone, 1984).

I have seen all of these films, but none of them in the theatre, so this is a great opportunity. In particular, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is often cited as the movie that absolutely needs to be seen on the big-screen to be fully appreciated. Director David Lean clearly conceived and designed his images assuming they would be projected in a theatre and not watched on the smaller screen, and much of the visual experimentation Lean does in this film is related to shot scale, making the viewer pick up small details out of his vast landscapes. Another must-see on the big screen is Kubrick’s 2001, which unexpectedly became a huge hit with college audiences in the late 60s because of the power of its images (aided by chemical enhancement, of course). For a major studio release, 2001 is one of the least narratively driven movies ever. Kubrick conceived the story in a grand scale that almost eliminates human beings and characters in the traditional sense; the most memorable character is a computer. What one remembers about 2001 is its images, which always have more of an impact in the theatre.

Widescreen cinema itself came into being in the early 1950s, as Hollywood responded to the threat of television. As a result, the idea was to make films that were bigger in size in order to lure audiences back to the cinema by giving them something they could not get at home. This idea first came from the huge success in 1952 of THIS IS CINERAMA, which was a 52-minute travelogue showing off the cinerama process (similar to IMAX technology today). Hollywood responded with its own widescreen processes, at first mostly for large bibical epics like THE ROBE (1953) but soon for more traditional dramas as well (such as Nicolas Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). And with filmmakers like David Lean and Stanley Kubrick, widescreen was used both as a vast visual spectacle, but also to de-center traditonal narrative, to offer audiences visual experiences that were more important than the stories they told. Eventually, especially with the rise of video in the 1980s, directors started to ignore the possibilities of using the entire frame, since the widescreen image would be cropped when released on video. Allen’s MANHATTAN is interesting in this regard, as Allen’s contract was such that he insisted that MANHATTAN be “letter-boxed” (with black bars on the top and bottom to retain the original widescreen image) when released on video because he felt too much of the image would be lost. In the current era of DVD and widescreen TVs, this is becoming less of a problem, and filmmakers should feel free to use the entire frame again. However, no recent spectacle films have the same visual audacity of Lean and Kubrick. Perhaps today’s filmmakers lack that type of vision, or, more likely, studios no longer trust filmmakers and audiences to experiment with the frame anymore. It is hard to imagine LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or 2001 being created today, even if Lean and Kubrick were still around to make them.

The cinematheque schedule is available here. There is no report yet on English subtitles for LA DOLCE VITA, YOJIMBO, or ENTER THE DRAGON.

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