I kept trying to come up with a witty start to this one, beyond some Huey Lewis reference. Alas, I’m not as witty or clever as I think I am.
Anyways, it’s somewhat interesting to think of why we end up with the shapes we do. Specifically screen shapes. These things can seem so immutable and eternal (they’re often accompanied by terms such as default or standard). But when you start digging into the history or backstory of things, you often discover a process of negotiation, compromise, arm-wringing, etc. that goes into making things the default. One thing that has interested me is how we arrived at 16:9 aspect ratio and have seemingly gotten stuck there.
Let’s dig into a bit of the backstory and history.
Things started out as squares. Well almost-squares (aka rectangles). At the beginnings of cinema, William Dickson used standard Kodak 35mm film. That persisted throughout most of the silent era. Sound brought with it the optical soundtrack, so the frame shifted a bit, to make room for sound on film.
However not everyone was satisfied with the the standards of that era. Why squares, some filmmakers asked? Why not circles, rectangles, triangles, etc. (You see the impulse to chop up the frame into configurations beyond a square shape pretty consistently in early film, specifically with the use of irises.)
Sergei Eisenstein was one such filmmaker, questioning why things are the way they are and also anticipating how the film industry can get stuck and stifled by adhering too strictly with one screen size or another.
“The Dynamic Square” was the title of a lecture given by Eisenstein at a meeting organized by the Technicians Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Hollywood on September 17, 1930. Sergei Eisenstein himself arrived in the USA in May 1930 with two collaborators – assistant Grigori Aleksandrov and camera operator Eduard Tisse. The two men had worked with Eisenstein throughout the 1920s, lending themselves to such films as: Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1927-1928) among others. They also collaborated on his unfinished ¡Que viva México!, which is another can of worms for another day. Eisenstein arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of 1930, where he signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. Famously, none of the projects he embarked on with Paramount came to fruition. By some accounts, Sergei Mikhailovich spent more time playing bridge than making films. The contract was mutually dissolved in October 1930. He would leave to Mexico to work on ¡Que viva México! in December of that year.
From left to right: Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei Eisenstein, Walt Disney, Eduard Tisse. June 1930
In Hollywood, Eisenstein encountered several transformations that were sweeping the film industry. One of which was the introduction of various wide-screen formats along with the push to standardize screening practices. What happened throughout the 1920s was that several wide-screen formats were introduced into industrial filmmaking (based either on filmstock itself or projection formats (anamorphic and so on.)
Antonio Somaini in his article The Screen as “Battleground”: Eisenstein’s “Dynamic Square” and the Plasticity of the Projection Format gives a lucid account of the variety of formats existent at the time.
“Natural Vision, developed by George K.Spoor and P.John Berggren, was a process using 63.5mm film,a 1.84 negative aspect ratio,and a 2:1 projection aspect ratio, which was used for the first time in 1926 for a film on the Niagara Falls and then in1927 for J.Stuart Blackton’s film The American, also known as The Flag Maker. Fox Grandeur, developed by Fox Film Corporation in 1929, used 70mm film, a 2.07:1 negative a/r, and a 2:1 projection a/r. Vitascope, developed by United Artists in 1930, used 65mm film, a 2:1 negative a/r, and a 2.05:1 projection a/r. And Magnafilm, developed by UnitedArtists, used70mm film. In 1930, RKO Radio Pictures developed another kind of NaturalVision, this time using 65mm film. Finally,if we limit ourselves to the main widescreen formats developed before Eisenstein’s lecture, there was Realife, developed by MGM, which used 70mm film, a 2.07:1 negative a/r, and a1.75:1 projection a/r.”
The aforementioned meeting Eisenstein attended and delivered his “Dynamic Square” talk was aimed to discuss all of the existing widescreen formats and to arrive at some sort of consensus. Technicians and producers would evaluate the technical and aesthetic value and hopefully arrive at some standard.
At the beginning of his talk, Eisenstein spoke out against any standardization, proclaiming:
“…by permitting the standardization of the new screen shape without the thorough weighing of all pros and cons of the question, we risk paralyzing once more for years and years to come our compositional efforts in new shapes as unfortunately chosen as those from which the practical realization of the wide film and the wide screen now seems to give us the opportunity of freeing ourselves.”
Eisenstein argued that the way out any paralysis was by way of what he called a dynamic square. It is what its name implies. A square frame that can be dynamic to encapsulate any number of formats within it. This plasticity would allow multitudes of compositional freedoms, all the while and most importantly not prilidging either the horizonal or vertical orientation. It’s important to note that to Eisenstein, to set a horizontal standard for the cinematic images means to exclude “50 percent of composition possibilities”.
A few other choice Eisenstein passages:
“In the forms of nature as in the forms of industry, and in the mutual encounter between these forms, we find the struggle, the conflict between both tendencies. and the screen-as the faithful mirror not only of conflicts emotional and tragic, but equally of conflict psychological and optically spatial-must be an appropriate battleground for the skirmishes of both these optical-by-view, but profoundly psychological-by-meaning, spatial tendencies on the part of the spectator.”
“The battlefield for such a struggle is easily found-it is the square. The one and only form that is equally fit, by alternately suppressing right and left or up and down, to embrace all the multitude of expressive rectangles in the world. or used as a whole to engrave itself by the ‘cosmic’ imperturbability of its squareness in the psychology of the audience. and this specially in a dynamic succession of dimensions from a tiny square in the center to the all-embracing full-size square the whole screen!”
Eisenstein’s proposal challenged one of the medium’s already implicit structures and represented an obstacle for the consolidation of universal industry standards and efficient commercialization. It should come as no surprise that the Academy opted for the much more manageable 4:3 horizontal rectangle, which had been used since the days of Edison and Dickson.
There’s a lot that has been written that as 4:3 expanded into television, cinema began to expand. All the sudden the rectangle became dynamic. There came CinemaScope, VistaVision, then later IMAX, and so on.
An interesting sidebar is how television (and then later, home video formats such as VHS, laserdisc, DVD, etc.) dealt with adapting those wider rectangles into its 4:3 aspect ratio. Things were letterboxed, other things were panned and scanned.
The Simpsons “Duffless” (Season 4, Episode 16, 1993). Left, original broadcast (4:3); Right, Disney+ (16:9)
(I have a separate post about Star Wars crawls across different formats here)
Then came the internet and a bit later, handheld devices. Instagram launched with a 1:1 aspect ratio. TikTok exploded vertical video into the mainstream. (Interesting to note, like Antonio Somaini does in his paper, that vertical video was (and in some cases still does) often attract the label of “amateurish” by a certain subset of filmmakers/creators).
It looks like we finally got to the dynamic square after all.
This is a streamlined version of a talk I gave at the ¡Que Viva Mexico! – Transnational Film and Audiovisual Art conference in Fall 2021.