BY: Andres Vallecilla Jaramillo
In the 1950s, Henry Chrétien creates the Anamorphoscope, renamed by the 20thth Century Fox as Cinemascope. One of its peculiarities was the use of anamorphic lenses that compressed the image vertically onto the negative.
At that time, films were shot in 1.33:1 format, or the famous 4:3. Then, with Cinemascope, the first cinemas with rectangular screens appeared, where many more details could be appreciated than on the 4:3 screen.
For this they used anamorphic lenses or Hypergonar lenses that compress the image onto the negative, and then, when By projecting it with a contrary lens onto a concave screen, the image was seen in its real proportions (2.66:1 format in Cinemascope, and currently more or less 2.35:1).
Over time it was no longer necessary to use the concave screen as this system was perfected so that it could be projected onto the flat screen that we enjoy now.
Thus, the image that was compressed onto the negative had higher resolution and was larger when decompressed.
On the other hand, in films without anamorphic format, sometimes the entire image of the negative (uncompressed) was taken and two black bars were implanted at the top and bottom, thus also obtaining a panoramic format but the aforementioned black bars made the film lose resolution.
The first film released in CinemaScope was THE ROBE (THE SACRED ROBE, 1953), produced by the 20th Century Fox, directed by Henry Koster and performed by Richard Burton y Victor Mature.
