With 10 nominations, one of the leading contenders at the upcoming Academy Awards on 3rd March 2025 is The Brutalist. These include Best Director for Brady Corbet, Best Actor for Adrian Brody, and Best Picture, but, for me at least, the most interesting will be Best Cinematography.
This is because The Brutalist’s director of photography, Lol Crawley and Corbet made the unusual choice of filming on a format called VistaVision. As someone interested in both the digital revolution and the power of old formats, this piqued my interest.
To understand why the makers of The Brutalist chose to do this, we need to dive into the fascinating history of cinematic film formats.
When Cinema Strikes Back
In the 1950s, cinema was threatened by a technology that encouraged people to stay home rather than venture out of the house for their entertainment (this would never happen today of course). It was called television and by the 1950s it had moved from niche to mainstream popularity. At that time, the standard movie aspect ratio was 1.37:1 (the Academy ratio), which was very similar to the shape of the picture on the small square box in the home.
To complete, the cinema industry felt the need to create something different. To that end, in 1952, 20th Century Fox introduced Cinerama, which offered an incredible 2.59:1 aspect ratio projecting onto new huge screens, an eye-grabbing step change. Soon after, 20th Century Fox introduced CinemaScope, which used anamorphic lenses to arrive at a wide 2.35:1 aspect ratio image.
However, both formats presented either exhibition or filming challenges. Cinerama required three projectors at once pointing at a huge, curved screen, while CinemaScope required anamorphic lenses which often suffered from edge distortion.
What is VistaVision?
Paramount’s response was VistaVision, which used standard 35mm film but, like in a stills camera, rotated it 90 degrees producing an eight-perforation-wide (8-perf) widescreen frame. This resulted in a negative that was over 2.66 times bigger than standard 35mm film, thus able to capture more light and produce a much more detailed and color-rich image.
The aspect ratio was also widescreen without requiring the anamorphic lenses. For exhibition, VistaVision was usually transferred to standard 35mm film, retaining much of the quality of the original VistaVision without exhibitors having to buy specialized projection equipment or reduce the number of seats to accommodate a super-large screen.
The first film to be shown in VistaVision was White Christmas in 1951, which was a huge success, and in the following years, other major movies used the format, including The Ten Commandments (1956) and Vertigo (1958).
However, VistaVision was also not immune to technical issues. As the frame was larger, it needed to run through the camera gate faster than regular vertical 35mm, which meant the costly prints often got damaged.
Soon the arrival of the even larger Todd-AO 70mm format, meant that by the end of the decade, VistaVision was all but obsolete. The last Hollywood VistaVision film of the era was One-Eyed Jacks shot in 1958 and released in 1961.
A New Hope
By the 1970s, VistaVision was a technology from a long time ago, a memory from far, far away. However, its star was about to shine again.
In 1976, a group of rebel filmmakers, working from a hidden warehouse, was looking for a way to bring the unique vision of a new and exciting director to the big screen.
His name was George Lucas, who in 1976 assembled a fledgling visual effects house, newly dubbed Industrial Light & Magic, to work on his bold science-fiction fantasy space adventure; Star Wars.
(The story is well told in the book Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution, by Michael Rubin. If you’re interested in how George Lucas changed the landscape of film, gaming, and design, it’s worth getting hold of).
As Rubin explains, the key technical challenge facing the group was how to realistically depict the story’s space battles. While in 1968 Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had broken the mold of science fiction’s notoriously primitive effects, that film was deliberately slow-paced. Lucas, however, wanted to combine the visceral feeling of high-speed World War II dogfights with the realism of 2001. When that film’s special effects supervisor, Douglas Trumball turned the offer down to work on Star Wars, Lucas turned to one of Trumball’s team, John Dykstra: who proceeded to change the face of cinema.
To achieve the desired look would require numerous visual effects elements, such as multiple ship miniatures, and additional details such as light and engine flares, all appearing on screen together at the same time, but all at high speed.
To make this work, Dykstra devised a way to combine a film camera with a computer, enabling each ship-miniature movement to be repeated precisely over multiple runs, at different angles: a system known as motion control.
This was combined with blue screen techniques to separate each pass, with each one then printed onto film. Eventually, all the versions were composited together using an optical printer. The problem was however that each time a layer was combined in the optical printer image quality was degraded. To output at film quality they needed to minimize the impact of the generational loss.
This made it essential to capture each layer of visual effects at the maximum possible quality. The natural choice here would be to use 70mm film, but this was very expensive and thus out of the question for a relatively low-budget film.
A Format Long Remembered
The answer was Dykstra’s next stroke of genius: rediscovering VistaVision. Its 8-perf large format frame offered enough size to keep the quality high even after multiple layers of effects were combined in the optical printer. What’s more, instead of being unaffordable, as VistaVision equipment was, literally, gathering dust, it’s likely Paramount would have been only too happy to have let these young unknowns, take the equipment and remaining film stock off its hands.
The motion control system, dubbed ‘Dykstraflex’ helped the film win an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in July 1977 and that original system is now on display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
While the format never came back into fashion, VistaVision’s method of film passing through the gate horizontally to maximize area was repeated by a rather more familiar format that applied the same principle but to 70mm film stock: IMAX.
Today this gives us the beauty of 1.43:1 films, projected on huge ‘Grand Theatre’ screens, such as Oppenheimer. While IMAX was first introduced in 1970, it wasn’t until Christopher Nolan used it to film parts of The Dark Knight in 2008, that use in feature films became more common – at least in other Chris Nolan productions. In a nice touch, for both The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan used VistaVision cameras to get full coverage of certain scenes due to the small number of available IMAX cameras.
Brutalist Architecture
Which brings us back to where we started with The Brutalist. As cinematographer Lol Crawley explains in this video, VistaVision was the ideal way to capture tall buildings that are central to the movie. “You’re not forced to shoot on wider angle lenses for a wider field of view. You know, you can get the same field of view on a longer lens, which obviously minimizes distortion. That was something that Brady was very keen to do.”
While film will likely always stay as a niche way of shooting films, as a wise old Jedi might have said, as long as there’s a use for it, no old technology, “is ever really gone”.
