what is a 70mm presentation

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What is 70mm?

We’re glad you asked! The ancestor of IMAX, 70mm refers to a high-resolution film stock twice the width of ordinary 35mm film. 65mm of the 70mm area is allocated for picture recording and the remaining 5mm for the high-fidelity, six-track magnetic soundtrack (replaced, on newer 70mm prints, by digital sound encoding). While experiments with large-format motion-picture stocks date back to the late 19th century, Hollywood first became interested in the late 1920s, when Fox Film Corporation (the forerunner of 20th Century Fox) introduced a short-lived 70mm film process known as “Grandeur,” used most notably by Raoul Walsh for his 1930 western The Big Trail . (A 35mm version of the film was shot simultaneously.) But the Great Depression and strong resistance from theater owners still in the process of upgrading to sound doomed Grandeur from the start, and it would be another 25 years decades before 70mm returned with a vengeance.

Beginning with Oklahoma! in 1955, a variety of new 70mm processes began to proliferate, including producer Mike Todd’s signature Todd-AO format (which employed a frame rate of 30 frames per second instead of the standard 24) and Ultra Panavision (which used a combination of 70mm stock and anamorphic lenses to create an extra wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio, seen in our series in Khartoum and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World ). In addition to those screening here, other films originally shot in 70mm include Around the World in 80 Days , Ben-Hur , Cleopatra , Lawrence of Arabia and Patton . The expense of making prints and equipping theaters with proper projection equipment kept 70mm restricted to premiere or “roadshow” engagements in major cities—with 35mm “reduction” prints created for general release—but the format remained in active use for big-budget studio prestige pictures throughout the 1960s, and was used for several decades after that to create “blowup” prints of 35mm movies for special engagements.

Championed by such filmmakers as Paul Thomas Anderson, Brad Bird, Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, the technology lives on in the form of IMAX (which uses 70mm film stock run horizontally through a specially designed camera) and in occasional films shot in traditional 70mm, including this year’s The Master and Samsara .

10 great films shot in 70mm

With directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino resurrecting the joys of large-format celluloid, we revisit those milestones of 70mm movie-making whose pleasures just cry out for the big screen.

23 December 2015

By  Matthew Thrift

It’s probably best, in the words of LL Cool J, that we don’t call it a comeback.

Not just yet, anyway.

With 3D so yesterday’s news, a small band of high-profile members of Hollywood’s digital resistance are resurrecting large-format celluloid – once the preserve of prestige epics from yesteryear – and one man is leading the charge. Not only did Quentin Tarantino shoot his eighth film, The Hateful Eight, on 70mm film – using reconditioned anamorphic lenses to create a super-widescreen image – he spearheaded a heroic campaign to retrofit over 100 cinemas worldwide with the projectors capable of screening the film in its intended, Ultra Panavision format.

The special ‘Roadshow’ cut of the film, complete with old-school overture and intermission, ran longer than its digital counterpart and needed to be seen to be believed. “The colours scream,” said cinematographer Robert Richardson in a Variety interview on the entirely photochemical process.

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With so many cinemas exclusively geared towards digital content today, it remains to be seen how many in the UK will be able to play The Hateful Eight from a 70mm print when it opens in January. It’s worth the effort to track down a celluloid screening over its 70-Milli-Vanilli DCP equivalent, the Roadshow cut’s success presumably going some way to determine the format’s fate in the long-run.

It’s not just the added cost and unwieldiness of shooting on such a large format, but as much a question of availability of equipment. Richardson was apparently unable to acquire the same lenses he’d used for Tarantino for his next project, as they’d already been nabbed by Gareth Edwards for the next Star Wars film.

It seems that public appetite has been whetted, however, as sold-out screenings at the Prince Charles Cinema in London – just one theatre where a 70mm projector has recently been installed – can attest. The format may be unlikely to attain the ubiquity of 3D, but then it’s only ever been used for the grandest of productions. So with these 100-odd cinemas now newly fitted with 70mm screening capabilities, we picked out 10 films we’d like to see play in their original format, on the big screen where they belong.

Ben-Hur (1959)

Director: William Wyler

Irrespective of the Gospels’ failure to tease the prospect of expanded cinematic universes beyond the story of the Christ, Hollywood was hardly about to let things lie on Golgotha. What Ben-Hur lacked in parallel-narrative necessity, it certainly made up for in scale, sidelining a certain Nazarene miracle-worker to the role of bit-player in favour of the altogether more toothy charms of Charlton Heston’s greased heroics.

From running time to budget, box office take to Oscar haul, it hardly matters that Ben-Hur remains little more than the sum of its stats. While it’s hard to recall much – even as you’re watching it – beyond the iconic chariot race, this thrilling sequence serves to wholly justify the film’s existence. It’s as breathless today as it is stunningly captured by MGM ’s newfangled Camera 65 system.

Exodus (1960)

Director: Otto Preminger

The most widely recognised of golden age Hollywood directors this side of Alfred Hitchcock (as much a result of his knack for self-promotion as his acting roles in Stalag 17 and the Batman TV series), Otto Preminger remains a tough customer to pin down. As famous for his singular series of film noirs in the 1940s as for his later institutional epics, Preminger would operate on the grandest scale with Exodus, a three-and-a-half-hour adaptation of Leon Uris’s bestseller charting the foundation of the state of Israel.

As well remembered now for its off-screen politics – Preminger hired (and credited) blacklisted screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo – as for those on screen, Exodus remains a directorial tour de force, however dated or one-sided it comes across retrospectively. Rarely screened today – in 70mm, especially – it was a modest hit on release, despite comedian Mort Sahl’s protestations against its length at the premiere, where he stood and shouted mid-film: “Otto, let my people go!”

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Director: David Lean

Of all the cinematic epics captured on 70mm, few come as grand and successfully realised as Lawrence of Arabia. It’s almost impossible to highlight just a single moment from the countless miracles the film pulls off: the visual onomatopoeia of cinema’s greatest ‘match’ cut? The dazzling, single-shot orchestration of the raid on Aqaba? Peter O’Toole dancing in the sunlight aboard the crashed train (shot by Nic Roeg and André de Toth’s second unit)? The dressing of the mirage sequence? Freddie Young’s peerless cinematography?

Of course, the film plays loose with historical veracity, seeking to de-mythologise Lawrence and any sense of Kiplingesque heroics in favour of something that aspires to Shakespearean tragedy. A portrait of a flawed, neurotic genius, its scale and ambition (the 313-day shoot lasting longer than the Arab revolt itself) serves to mock even the most impressive home cinema set-up.

Cleopatra (1963)

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Movies don’t come much bigger than Cleopatra. One of the most expensive and extravagant productions in Hollywood history – it’s $44m budget equates to over $300m today – it remains notorious (incorrectly) as one of cinema’s biggest flops. Originally conceived as a swords-n-sandals quickie, the scale – and problems – swiftly escalated once Elizabeth Taylor was cast in the title role. “Tell them I’ll do it for a million dollars,” said Taylor, cementing her position as the highest paid actress in the business, her behind-the-scenes antics with lover Richard Burton keeping John Glenn’s first orbit of the earth off the front pages of the world’s press.

Audiences came for Liz and Dick; what they got was four hours of riotously camp melodrama and an unimpeachable production design that dwarfed the epic standard set by Ben-Hur. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz called it: “The most difficult three films I’ve ever made,” going some way to explaining why they don’t make’em like they used to.

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)

Director: Anthony Mann

Revisiting the films on this list chronologically, as they’re presented here, provides quite the tonic when one gets to The Fall of the Roman Empire. That it feels so cynical compared to the bombastic emphasis on scale and spectacle employed by Ben-Hur and Cleopatra should come as little surprise, given the proclivities of its director, the great Anthony Mann. Not that the film wants for scale or spectacle either, both of which remain plentiful in Mann’s wintry widescreen vistas. It’s more that it actively suppresses any triumphalism in favour of a masochistic sense that the epoch’s end is predetermined.

To which end, its sensibilities feel strikingly modern, even as it possesses a tactility of design that could never be replicated in our CG -reliant era. Narratively speaking, it shares a kinship with Gladiator (2000), but Mann’s poised frames, encompassing an increasingly desolate strangeness, knock that young upstart’s pretensions for six.

Cheyenne Autumn (1964)

Director: John Ford

If ever there were a filmmaker for whom 70mm were made, it’s John Ford. It’s a shame he didn’t get to work with the format until late in his career (he only made two subsequent features), and that Cheyenne Autumn is hardly a film to rank among his best works. It’s a disjointed telling of a Native American tribe’s journey back to their homeland from enforced exile, something of an apologia for Ford’s less-than-progressive depictions earlier in his career.

While the film feels padded to epic-length – not least through a diversion to Dodge City for an extended James Stewart cameo – there’s no denying the majesty of its location work, stunningly captured in Super Panavision 70 by cinematographer, William Clothier.

Playtime (1967)

Director: Jacques Tati

If ever there were a movie that benefited from the extra definition afforded by shooting on 70mm, it’s Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece, Play Time. With sight-gags playing out, often simultaneously, in every nook and cranny of Tati’s architecturally rigorous frame, it’s impossible to take in everything that Playtime has to offer in a single viewing.

An endlessly inspired, delightfully strange urban satire, it’s a film of absurd curiosity and curious absurdities, shot over two years on a vast, specially constructed city set. The production was plagued with drawbacks, from Tati’s notorious perfectionism to much of the set being destroyed in a storm. A box-office failure on its initial release (bankrupting its director in the process), it’s now considered Tati’s crowning achievement; a film of jaw-dropping ambition that demands the big-screen experience, all the better to drink in its exquisite details played out on the grandest stage.

TRON  (1982)

Director: Steven Lisberger

This was shot predominantly on Super Panavision 65, but it’s incredible to think that TRON ’s groundbreaking effects were executed on a computer with just 330mb of storage and a mere 2mb of memory. Jeff Bridges stars as arcade-owning hacker Flynn, digitally interpolated into the computer system he helped create. With its digital gladiatorial contests and technological anthropomorphism, TRON remains a sugar-rush of singular aesthetic vision, standing apart from the effects-driven vehicles that would follow in its wake.

The rotoscopic technique – a combination of traditional cel-animation and multi-layered photographic effects – marks the film as a visually thrilling one-off, its closest descendants perhaps Richard Linklater’s animated experiments, Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). Even its belated, underrated sequel TRON : Legacy (2010) jettisoned both format and approach for a more conventional – if still remarkable – digitally-rendered IMAX  spectacle.

Hamlet (1996)

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Continuing the format’s synonymity with prestige and scale, it’s fitting that the first fully unexpurgated cinematic adaptation of Hamlet would be the last film to be shot on 70mm before the recent semi-revival begun by the last film on our list. Running to over four hours, Branagh’s film cuts as few corners in its production as it does with Shakespeare’s text, the cast list alone an international Who’s Who of old-school and neophyte Bard-botherers.

While Blenheim Palace stands in for Elsinore exteriors, it’s the sumptuous interiors (by production designer Tim Harvey) shot on stages at Shepperton Studios that prove the film’s true star, not least the mirrored throne room around which key scenes revolve. If Branagh’s lead defines an acquired taste, there are few such concerns as far as his direction is concerned, especially when coupled with Alex Thomson’s stellar lensing. It may not reach the dizzying peaks of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare films, but as adaptations go, it’s up there with the best of the rest.

The Master (2012)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

The special 70mm presentation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master back in 2012 proved there’s an appetite for a unique cinema experience away from the now-ubiquitous (and home-replicable) 3D screenings. Using a different set of lenses to those more usually adopted for such a large format, The Master eschews the vast, anamorphic widescreen frame for something tighter, its emphasis on portraiture over the grand landscapes of its antecedents.

Word is out that Anderson is looking to return to 70mm for his next feature (his last, 2014’s Inherent Vice was shot on 35mm), apparently inspired by the 2.78:1 aspect ratio adopted by Tarantino for The Hateful Eight. With Kodak recently announcing a return to profitability in the wake of the latest Star Wars film – perhaps the most high-profile recent feature shot on celluloid – it looks like the format could be back to stay. That said, Anderson could shoot his next feature on a phone, and we’d still be queuing round the block.

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Explained: What is 70mm film and how is it different from ordinary format? Exploring the hype behind Oppenheimer's ratio

W ith Oppenheimer out and about, there is little doubt about the film's great craftsmanship. The IMAX favorite has won the hearts of viewers and critics alike, making it one of the most successful projects from Christopher Nolan, who has an affinity for good-looking cinema. Over the course of the past few weeks, there have been plenty of mentions about the 70mm film format, which has been used for shooting the Cillian Murphy starrer.

There have been plenty of discussions about the theaters that are more suited to Oppenheimer and the intriguing format that makes the viewing so pleasurable. However, many still fail to understand what makes this format different from the ordinary film format and how it could impact the viewing of Oppenheimer.

In simple words, the 70mm format utilizes frames that are larger in size and wider in aspect ratio than the standard 35mm format. This lets filmmakers capture bigger frames and more richly detailed images within the same rectangle. However, they do need bigger screens for a more holistic experience, much like the 70mm IMAX screens that are ideally suited for Oppenheimer.

"Epic story of a complicated patriot." - TIME.

Get Tickets now to see #Oppenheimer on the largest screen possible. OppenheimerMovie.com pic.twitter.com/nGxv8AgWOS

Another easier analogy to understand the difference between 35mm and 70mm film is the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray. Though not quite similar, it is easier to understand how Blu-ray fits in better resolution and more detail in the same frame.

Exploring the 70mm film format

The 70mm format is hardly a new innovation, unlike many new screen-based technologies. Instead, full-format images have been around since the invention of cinema. However, a 70mm reel meant a larger, heavier, and more cumbersome set of equipment.

Hence, the 35mm was often preferred in the early days. However, 70mm was used for certain sequences or certain movies, like Lawrence of Arabia, to give the moviegoers a sense of added realism and grandeur, something that Christopher Nolan has also aimed for with Oppenheimer.

Apart from the aspect ratio, the pixel density is also different for 70mm films, with the pixels going up to 8000 in certain films. Recently, there has been a resurgence of the format, especially because of the need for more visual appeal. Films like West Side Story have relied on this format before.

Why is it necessary to watch Oppenheimer on a 70mm screen?

The primary reason why there is hype about watching Oppenheimer on the 70mm IMAX screen , which is quite rare in the United States, is because of the director's comments.

Nolan had previously explained that his idea for the film involved watching it in the 70mm format, which could effectively immerse viewers in a 3D-like world. He said:

"The sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled...The headline, for me, is by shooting on IMAX 70mm film, you're really letting the screen disappear. You're getting a feeling of 3D without the glasses. You've got a huge screen and you're filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You're immersing them in the world of the film."

Moreover, the film is also shot in IMAX format, making it all the more appealing on the bigger screen.

Oppenheimer is now playing in theaters .

Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

What is 70mm.

What Is 70mm? A History of Wide-Gauge Cinema by Nick Pinkerton

It is the format of imperial pomp and imperial folly. It is a tool for showmen that has occasionally found its way into the hands of artists , and sometimes the showman and the artist have been one and the same person. The wide-gauge format 70mm reached its greatest popularity in the 1950s amid a boom of new innovations (Cinemascope, Cinerama, 3D) intended to reverse the fortunes of foundering Hollywood studios; for a time, they even appeared to have done the trick. But every great reign is followed by an epoch of decadence, and the heyday of 70mm encompassed smashes and busts: Oklahoma! (1955) but also Dr. Doolittle (1967); Ben-Hur (1959) but also Cleopatra (1963). One of the greatest films shot in 70mm appeared at the cusp of its popular decline, Anthony Mann’s significantly titled The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). Now Quentin Tarantino, the most high-profile (or at least the most grating) public advocate for preserving analog celluloid as an exhibition format, has shot his The Hateful Eight on the all-but-extinct Ultra Panavision 70, making a crackerjack piece of advance publicity of this fact. The film will open on Christmas in—one expects—nearly every 70mm-equipped theater in the country. As to if this signifies a rise or fall of the format, and in the industry as a whole, remains to be seen.

1. Early Experiments

The appeal of the wide-film image is a combination of consuming clarity and enveloping breadth. Audiences have always been in thrall to the impression made by sheer size, and all the more so when they can lose themselves in a delicate fretwork of detail within that largeness. Herein lay the draw of the original “blockbusters,” paintings on the grand scale teeming with brushstrokes, like the Belshazzar’s Feast (1821) of John Martin, that Cecil B. DeMille of the 19th century; the heroic nationalist mythologies of Jacques-Louis David and John Trumbull; or Frederic Edwin Church’s jungle vista The Heart of the Andes (1859). These are paintings whose subject matters—immersive exotic environments separated from the culture that produced them by vast historical or geographic distance, military fanfare, and the movements of massed men—would often be echoed by those of wide-gauge cinema.

We can’t say how, exactly, the original innovators of wide-gauge celluloid would’ve explained their compulsion toward bigness, but while wide-film formats reached their pinnacle of public visibility from about 1955 to 1965, the history of wide-film goes back very nearly to the birth of cinema. The most touted early innovators of the celluloid motion picture camera on either side of the Atlantic, Auguste and Louis Lumière in France and Thomas Alva Edison and W. K. L. Dickson in the United States, both used a practical, puny 35mm film strip for their early cameras and projectors, though at the time it was by no means the only possible option, and other contemporaries had ideas of their own. Stateside, Edison tried unsuccessfully to exclusively patent his four-perforation 35mm filmstrip. This attempt was struck down by a 1902 court ruling, but until then cautious competitors were forced to experiment with their own formats of varying sizes. Birt Acres, who invented the first 35mm moving picture camera in England and who some consider to have been out ahead of the Lumières, shot a 70mm film of the Henley Regatta in July of 1896. Dickson, after leaving Edison’s employ, experimented with a 68mm filmstrip at the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, feeding it through the projector by means of unreliable rubber rollers. France’s Demeny-Gaumont produced a 60mm film, while Prestwich in the U.K. made the 63mm negative on which the first wide-gauge hit of early cinema was shot, depicting the entire fourteen-round fight between boxers James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City, Nevada, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1897. (Its unusual 1.65:1 widescreen frame, which captured a broader swath of the ring, was dubbed “Veriscope,” an early episode in the long history of hanging silly names onto wide-film processes.) Even the Lumières got into the act, exhibiting a 75mm “widefilm” at Paris’s Universal Exposition of 1900, where the other attractions included Cinéorama, an immersive early virtual reality ride devised by Raoul Grimoin-Sanson which used ten synchronized 70mm projectors to reproduce the experience of hovering over the Jardin des Tuileries in a hot air balloon. (The Cinéorama was shut down after only four days for safety reasons, but its spirit would live on in such novelty formats as Fred Waller’s eleven-projector Vitarama at the 1939 World’s Fair.)

After these early years of idiosyncratic film formats run amok, the Edison-established Motion Picture Patents Company fixed 35mm as the national standard in 1909, and the Congrès International des éditeurs de films in Paris followed suit shortly thereafter. While this thinned the herd of nonconforming wide-film formats, it didn’t end experimentation on wide-gauge film outright. Filoteo Alberini, an Italian exhibitor and cinematographer who had been dabbling in wide-film since the turn of the last century, introduced his 70mm Panoramico Alberini in 1914. John P. Berggren and George Spoor, a cofounder of Chicago-based Essanay Studios, tinkered incessantly with a 63.5mm process called “Natural Vision,” which they used to shoot views from a roller coaster and the Niagara Falls with the intention of inducing potential investors, screening the results in 1926. (A January 1930 article in American Cinematographer on “The Early History of Wide Films” claims that Berggren and Spoor “have worked for more than ten years” on Natural Vision.)

The Natural Vision process would be little employed in feature filmmaking, being used on The American (1927), a now-lost western made under the auspices of “Natural Vision Pictures,” and Danger Lights , a railroad yard drama released by RKO that had its wide-gauge engagement at Chicago’s State Lake Theatre in November 1930. By the time that RKO had begun monkeying around with Natural Vision, they were playing catch-up with the other studios, who’d been testing out their own wide-gauge, widescreen films. Fox Film Corporation introduced their 70mm Grandeur process in 1929, and released a handful of films in it, including Frank Borzage’s Song o’ My Heart and Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail , both in 1930. They would appear at roughly the same time that Warner Brothers, not to be outdone, was unveiling John Francis Dillon’s Kismet (1930), playing in ten cities across America in 65mm, 2.05:1 Vitascope, and that MGM trotted out its 70mm, 2.13:1 Realife, essentially employing the licensed Grandeur camera and lenses, showcased on King Vidor’s Billy the Kid (1930).

In addition to widescreen processes using wide-gauge film, there were several that attempted to create a larger image without abandoning the 35mm format. Perhaps the most famous of these is Polyvision, the simultaneous projection of three synchronized 1.33:1 images that allowed for the triptych scenes in Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927). Along similar lines, in 1921 George W. Bingham and John D. Elms invented a process called Widescope, in which a double-lensed camera recorded images onto two 35mm strips, which combined for an effective 2.66:1 aspect ratio when projected side-by-side. A process called Magnascope was used in exhibiting the maritime battle scenes of Paramount’s 1926 Old Ironsides . At the film’s debut at the since-demolished Rivoli on Broadway and 49th, the image suddenly expanded at a crucial moment in the action, nearly tripling in size from 12 x 18 to 30 x 40 feet as Dr. Hugo Riesenfeld’s orchestra performed “Ship of State.” (Magnascope was also employed in select sequences in other Paramount films, including Chang and Wings .) The effect was produced using a lens on the projector that literally magnified the 35mm frame, enlarging image and grain alike , and resulting in a coarse, low-resolution picture, leading Paramount to further experiments with 56mm Magnifilm, their answer to Grandeur, Vitascope, and Realife. Combined, all of these bits of trial and error and stymied innovation evoke an image not unlike archival footage of failed flying machines, always used to redoubtable comic effect.

These simultaneously occurring developments would appear to presage the wide-gauge, widescreen revolution, but that industry upheaval would have to wait for more than another two decades. This was a matter of economics, pure and simple—there was a Depression at the time, for starters, and moreover exhibitors had just laid out the cash to retrofit their booths and theaters to accommodate new sound-on-film technology, and were in no position to put themselves in hock by paying for another makeover. Until the 1950s, most high-profile developments in film format would involve new narrow-gauge stocks for home usage. Then, at midcentury , faced with new competition and dwindling audiences, the studios struck on supersizing the screen as one way to reestablish moviegoing as an event . As the question of how to get a bigger image without concurrently sacrificing image quality was raised, the old wide-format processes, long malingering in neglect, were waiting to be picked up again.

2. The Big Fifties

The key figure in the return of wide-format cinema was a flamboyant Minneapolis-born theater impresario named Mike Todd, who had entered the motion picture business in 1950, helping to bring a process called Cinerama before the public eye. Fred Waller, earlier of Vitarama fame, had invented Cinerama some years previous, but until the intervention of backers Todd, Lowell Thomas, and Merian C. Cooper, codirector of the Magnascope classic Chang , he had been unable to produce a practical demonstration of it, in part because of the exigencies required for its exhibition—projection of the Cinerama image involved three interlocked projectors running simultaneously, à la Polyvision, their beams combining to create a single image on a special curved screen.

This Is Cinerama , the long-deferred coming-out party for Waller’s process whose scenes included a new variation on the old Natural Vision roller coaster ride, premiered at the Broadway Theatre in New York City on September 30, 1952, but by that time Todd had already left the company, seeking to invest in a widescreen technique that would eliminate the exorbitant demands that Cinerama placed on an exhibitor. The resulting product was Todd-AO, a single-projector widescreen format using a 65mm camera negative and 70mm release print. The “AO” stood for the American Optical Company in Buffalo, New York, where the principal architect of Todd-AO, Dr. Brian O’Brien, the director of the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, midwifed it into existence. Todd’s other partners included George Skouras, President of United Artists Theatres, and Joseph Schenck, a veteran studio executive who’d produced Roland West’s 1930 The Bat Whispers , the only film shot in 65mm Magnifilm—no apparent relation to the 56mm Paramount process—with whom Todd formed the Magna Theatre Corporation.

Besides lending the new technology his namesake and oversight, Todd concentrated his efforts on its behalf to his area of expertise: ballyhoo. For the first Todd-AO feature, he set out to sweet-talk composer-librettist team Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, then nothing less than an American institution, into selling him the rights to their 1943 stage hit Oklahoma! , which offered a hummable songbook and, in its “wind comes sweepin’ down the plains” locations, plenty of picturesque opportunities to show off the process. Rodgers and Hammerstein were sufficiently impressed by the Todd-AO demonstration film that they were shown, depicting the canals of Venice, to give Todd and his partners the go-ahead, and Oklahoma! , directed by Fred Zinnemann, premiered on October 11, 1955, at the Hollywood Egyptian in Los Angeles, equipped for the occasion with a mammoth new curved screen intended to emphasize the enveloping embrace of the extreme wide angle photography. Oklahoma! handily earned back its original budget, and the next Todd-AO film, Michael Anderson’s star-strewn Around the World in 80 Days (1956), was a gargantuan hit. A contemporary parody ( Around the Days in 80 Worlds ) in Harvey Kurtzman’s short-lived humor magazine Humbug refers to “Mike Toddy” and his “Toddy A-OO-AH-EE wide screen, bringing movie talkies a step closer to feelies,” while its dialogue razzes the perceived excessive breath of the 2.20:1 Todd-AO frame:

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fogg! We’ve run out of fuel. We can’t find another scrap of wood in the box! We’ll never make it back to England in time!”

“Have you searched both ends of the Toddy-A-AH-E-O wide screen? Surely there is wood somewhere in those vast expanses.”

The successes of Oklahoma! , Around the World in 80 Days , and Todd-AO triggered the second coming, after the late 1920s, of the wide-gauge rush. After Cinerama, the appearance of CinemaScope had expanded the accessibility of widescreen movies—though the latter, by taking over more screen real-estate without a corresponding increase in the size of the film area that was being enlarged through projection, effectively downgraded the resolution of the image being shown, a variation on the old Magnascope conundrum. Fox, who’d been unusually committed to Grandeur, had released the first shot-in-CinemaScope feature, Henry Koster’s The Robe , in fall of 1953. They were also the first on the wide-gauge bandwagon, taking a page from Todd’s playbook and introducing their “Cinemascope 55” with two tried-and-true Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, Carousel and The King and I (both 1956). Cinemascope 55, as the name suggests, used 55mm film, shot on a modified Grandeur camera, though both Carousel and The King and I were exhibited in 35mm and 70mm. Ultimately, equipping theaters for 55mm projection was deemed impracticable, and Fox entered into an exclusive arrangement with Todd-AO beginning with their next Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptation, South Pacific (1958), which also abandoned some of the more idiosyncratic elements of Todd-AO: the thirty frames-per-second frame rate and the curved screen. After Todd’s death in plane crash in spring of 1958, Fox assumed control of the Todd-AO process, and over the next decade the Todd-AO label would grace films including Porgy and Bess (1959), The Alamo (1960), Cleopatra (1963), The Sound of Music (1965), Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Krakatoa, East of Java (1969), and Airport (1970), with increasingly less prominence as the brand’s early luster began to fade.

3. Further Expansions

Todd’s death came just as the wide-gauge boom that he’d envisioned was entering its full swing. His soon-to-be-widow, Elizabeth Taylor, would, some time before Cleopatra , star in Raintree County (1957), the first film shot in MGM’s 65mm Camera 65 process, distinguished by its band-thin 2.76:1 aspect ratio. After Ben-Hur (1959), the Camera 65 name was retired, and the format was renamed Ultra Panavision, used on films including Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), The Battle of the Bulge (1965), and Khartoum (1965). ( The Hateful Eight will be the first feature outing for Ultra Panavision in nearly forty years.)

Camera 65/Ultra Panavision was developed with the assistance of Panavision, a Los Angeles company who’d made a fortune by manufacturing anamorphic lenses in the early days of widescreen, and who would later debut a wide-gauge format of their own, the somewhat confusingly named Super Panavision 70. Walt Disney Pictures’ The Big Fisherman (1959), directed by a past-prime Borzage, was the first Super Panavision 70 production, followed in short order by Exodus (1960), West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and perhaps the two most famous wide-gauge productions of all time, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Super Panavision would be the preferred format of the few 1980s wide-gauge revivalists, including Tron (1982) and Brainstorm (1983), though its credits for the latter half of the 60s are hit-and-miss, including Lord Jim (1965), Grand Prix (1965), Ice Station Zebra (1968), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Song of Norway (1970), and Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970).

Lean, whose Doctor Zhivago (1965) was also released in a personally overseen 70mm blow-up, though MGM only budgeted him to shoot in 35mm, was one of a handful of directors to wholeheartedly embrace wide-gauge; Otto Preminger, Anthony Mann, and Robert Wise all got more than one wide-film movie under their belts. John Huston, for his part, never met a novelty presentation he didn’t like; he’d had his 1956 Moby-Dick treated to an early version of the desaturating bleach bypass process, had Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) tinted a jaundiced yellow to mute the colors of DP Aldo Tonti’s cinematography, and with The Bible… In the Beginning (66), debuted the 70mm Dimension 150 system. D-150 for short, Dimension 150 was the invention of Dr. Richard Vetter and Carl W. Williams, two members of the faculty in the Audio-Visual Communications department at the University of California, who created it by adapting the basic principle of a driving simulator that they’d designed. Like Cinerama or the early Todd-AO, D-150 was intended to be shown on a curved screen—a 120-degree arc, to be specific—and making this costly modification a prerequisite ultimately doomed it; Franklin J. Schnaffer’s Patton (70) was the next and last film made using the format.

Along with the wide-gauge processes came various pseudo-wide-film techniques. The most widely used of these was Technirama, a process developed by Technicolor as an anamorphic alternative to CinemaScope, introduced in a 1956 promotional film called The Curtain Rises on Technirama . Technirama in fact used 35mm film, though run through the camera horizontally; the larger, horizontal film area was meant to produce a sharper image than CinemaScope, and often release prints were optically printed in 70mm from the 35mm negative and billed as Super Technirama 70. Marlene Dietrich vehicle The Monte Carlo Story (1957) was the first feature shot and released in Super Technirama 70, and over the following decade the format would be frequently utilized in shooting sword-and-sandals films and historical epics, acting as something like the house format for producer Samuel Bronston, who briefly made a cottage industry of producing that sort of material in his studios outside of Madrid. ( King of Kings [1961], El Cid [1961], 55 Days at Peking [1963], Circus World [1964]), while flamboyant Neapolitan Dino de Laurentiis, who would use D-150 for The Bible and Ultra Panavision 70 for Battle of the Bulge , dabbled in Super Technirama with Barabbas (1962), directed by early CinemaScope master Richard Fleischer.

Some Super Technirama 70 credits with auteur interest include Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents (1961), Vittorio Cottafavi’s Hercules and the Captive Women (1963), and Cy Endfield’s Zulu (1964). Just as often, however, Super Technirama 70 would be the vehicle for little-remembered international coproduction cash-ins like Imperial Venus (1962), La Fayette (1962), and The Golden Head (1965). Taken altogether, the history of Super Technirama 70—and the Golden Age of wide-film formats—doubles as a snapshot of movies in the first age of runaway production, when “Hollywood” talent and money decamped from Southern California to Europe, taking advantage of exchange rates and tax shelters. Meanwhile European-based industries, while somewhat slower to adapt, developed their own widescreen techniques and wide-gauge formats. Jacques Tati filmed his Play Time (1967) with 65mm Mitchell cameras and premiered it in 70mm at the Paris Empire, where it showed in an unorthodox, rather “tall” 1.77:1 aspect ratio. Beginning in 1958 the Soviet Union had their own Sovscope 70, created when some traitor sold the secrets of Todd-AO to the Russians, which they in turn leant to Akira Kurosawa for his Russo-Japanese coproduction Dersu Uzala (1975). In West Germany there was Superpanorama 70, developed by Jan Jacobsen, a Norwegian in the employ of Munich-based Modern Cinema Systems (MCS), which apparently was sufficiently near in quality to Todd-AO that footage from both formats could be integrated in The Sound of Music . The Germans employed their wide-gauge system in much the same manner as the Americans: on period action-adventure pictures, stuff like The Black Tulip (1964), a swashbuckler starring Alain Delon, or Old Shatterhand (1964), an adaptation of one of German author Karl May’s wildly popular Western novels.

The same Jan Jacobson, who died in Augsberg in 1998, was also credited with building the first IMAX camera. The product of the Canadian IMAX Corporation, IMAX uses a 65mm negative, fed through the camera horizontally, as with Super Technirama, creating a frame area of unparalleled dimensions. The first IMAX theater, the Cinesphere, opened its doors in Toronto in May 1971. At much the same time, other pre-existing wide-gauge formats were being less and less in use at first-run theaters. The final film shot using the Todd-AO 65/70 process, The Last Valley , a drama set during the Thirty Years’ War written and directed by author-of-doorstop-sized-historical-fiction-tomes James Clavell, was released in January 1971. Since the beginning of the wide-gauge sensation there had been a profusion of blow-ups à la Doctor Zhivago , films shot on plain-old 35mm then printed on 70, with Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963) one notable early example. These pseudo-70mm presentations, whose image quality might very well be impressive while still falling short of the genuine item, would continue to appear throughout the seventies— Waterloo (1970), The Towering Inferno (1974), The Wind and the Lion (1975), A Bridge Too Far (1977), and even Star Wars (1977), which played at the Odeon Marble Arch in London on a bowed D-150 screen—but for all practical purposes the cycle of shot-and-exhibited-in-wide-gauge films that began with Oklahoma! in 1955 had run its course by the end of the sixties.

4. Gauging the Present

After around 1970, the wide-gauge field was increasingly limited to special venue presentations of the sort that IMAX would gradually corner the market in. Traditionally, IMAX theaters were installed in cultural institutions—natural history museums and the like—and the subject matters of IMAX films overwhelmingly skewed toward exploring natural wonders of the world. The last I saw was the Canadian production Flight of the Butterflies (2012), tracking the migration of Monarch butterflies across the whole of the North American continent, filling the screen with fluttering orange and black. Some inroads have been made to push IMAX as a viable format for theatrical films, however, beginning with Walt Disney Productions’ millennial release of Fantasia 2000 .

The wide-gauge torch has been, to a certain extent, kept burning by Disney, whose corporate parent company has long maintained an interest in unorthodox film formats—at the Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida, one can still experience immersive Circle-Vision 360°, a modern descendant of Cinéorama and Vitarama achieved through the simultaneous projection of nine 35mm images. Disney released Tron , shot partially in Super Panavision 70, in 1982; three years later The Black Cauldron (1985) would be the first Disney animated feature released in 70mm since 1959’s Sleeping Beauty . Pickings were slim through the following decade, limited to Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992), Ron Fricke’s Baraka (1993), and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), this author’s first 70mm experience, which he persists in remembering as awe-striking, regardless of the dizzying decline in Branagh’s critical reputation. Perhaps the most intriguing of the 70mm “revival” productions, at least as originally conceived, was the sophomore feature by Douglas Trumbull, Brainstorm . Trumbull had achieved a certain level of fame as one of the special effects supervisors on 2001: A Space Odyssey , but after his 1971 directorial debut Silent Running , he devoted an ever-greater amount of his time and attention to developing and fine-tuning a new 65mm wide-gauge process which he called Showscan. Brainstorm was intended to act as the unveiling of Showscan, the most distinguishing feature of which was its sixty frames-per-second frame rate, which was intended to create a surreal lucidity when used in Brainstorm , much as later films including Little Buddha (1993) and Shutter Island (2010) would use wide-gauge film in selected scenes to give the impression of a heightened hyper-reality. MGM, who held the purse strings on the troubled production of Brainstorm , finally forced Trumbull to use Super Panavision 70, though he has continued to experiment with high fps formats, also a preoccupation of Peter Jackson, who released a 48 fps version of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) in select cinemas.

Trumbull has kept a fairly low profile in recent years, though re-emerged to design the visual effects sequences in The Tree of Life (2011), one of several films that Terrence Malick and DP Emmanuel Lubezki have shot at least part of in Panavision System 65. (The others are The New World [2005] and To the Wonder [2012]). The System 65 camera, an update of Super Panavision 70 introduced shortly after the appearance of the wide-gauge Arri 765 in 1989, was also used on Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012)—a curio in that it uses a format which has traditionally been reserved for large-scale costume epics for a rather intimate actors’ duet—and is a favorite of Christopher Nolan, an analog holdout like Anderson and Tarantino, who has filmed his movies from The Prestige (2006) to Interstellar (2014), in part or whole, in wide-film formats. The names listed above suggest that the wide-gauge, once beloved by studios and producers as a promotional tool, has been revived by name-above-the-title auteurs for either imagistic or status-symbol qualities—though this isn’t the whole story. Today as during the lean years of wide-gauge film, 65/70mm has sometimes been used in special effects sequences for the most dunderheaded of blockbusters—for example, on this year’s Jurassic World .

Taken altogether, this activity accounts for a small-but-not-unimpressive resurgence of wide-gauge as a creative option. It’s too soon to say if we’re in for a full-scale revival—and plenty of reasons to say that we’re probably not—but there has been an uptick in interest, even if nothing more than a blip, in large format cinema. This may in part be attributed to the same motives behind the post-Todd-AO wide-gauge boom: an attempt to decisively distinguish and elevate immersive cinematic spectacle from television and small devices—part and parcel with the “Go Big or Go Home” campaign currently being waged by the Regal Entertainment Group. Concomitant to this is a desire for any pretext to mark up prices for a Special Event spectacle, the same desire that briefly allowed the studios to believe that 3D was the savior of the box-office in the wake of Avatar (2009). The tactic is older than cinema: when Church displayed The Heart of the Andes at the Studio Building on West 10th Street in 1859, over 12,000 spectators paid 25 cents a head to view his masterpiece. Tickets for The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight were $1.00 in 1897, while orchestra level admission for a primetime screening of Oklahoma! at the Rivoli were $3.50—and who knows how much you’ll pay to see The Hateful Eight . As for the existence of a wide-gauge aesthetic, well, what could possibly unify The Tree of Life and Jurassic World (other than the presence of saurians, that is)? As ever, the canvas is worthless without the right artist to fill it, and all the resolution in the world means nothing if it isn’t clarifying something worth seeing.

The film series See It Big: 70mm ran from August 7–30 , 2015 at Museum of the Moving Image.

PART OF SERIES

• At the Museum
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© Reverse Shot, 2024. All rights reserved Support for this publication has been provided through the National Endowment for the Arts. Moving Image Source was developed with generous and visionary support from the Hazen Polsky Foundation, in memory of Joseph H. Hazen.

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Everything You Need To Know About 70mm Film (Plus How It Will Look In Theaters And At Home)

By now, you’ve probably heard the hype surrounding Quentin Tarantino ‘s The Hateful Eight and its rare, 70mm Ultra Panavision format. It sure sounds fancy, but you’re probably wondering: what the heck is 70mm, anyway? And how is it going to look when you watch it in theaters? Or, perhaps more importantly for you couch potatoes, how will the film’s quality fare when it’s available to stream at home? Not to worry: we’ve got all of your formatting and aspect ratio questions answered so you’ll have an idea of what to expect from Tarantino’s latest western epic, no matter where or how you see it following its Christmas Day release. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnRbXn4-Yis] What is 70mm and why does it matter? In essence, a 70mm (or 65mm) print of film is a higher resolution format and twice the size of a standard 35mm print. Instead of adhering to the commonly used aspect ratios of 1.375:1 (Academy) or 1.85:1 (standard widescreen; familiarly 16:9), it stretches the image to a much wider ratio of 2.20:1 to 2.28:1 . Though it seems like a confusing, flashy new fad used by some of the industry’s most profitable directors, including Tarantino, Christopher Nolan , and Paul Thomas Anderson ; 70mm has been around since the dawn of motion pictures . Back when audiences would trek out to the “movie palaces” of yesteryear , they sat before a massive, incredibly wide screen that called for an equally wide image. As populations increased and towns across the country acquired multiple movie theaters, however, the size of the screens shrunk, ultimately doing away with the 70mm format and adopting the Academy standard 35mm before the rise of digital. It’s similar to what’s happening nowadays as screens get smaller and smaller. With the advent of digital, new versions of films (that are physically shot on digital, not celluloid film) are able to crunch down the image to whatever size your screen is without compromising resolution, whether you’re watching on your TV, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

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Complete Guide to 70mm Film

Optional description here.

As this is my twentieth freebie for HTML5 UP I decided to give it a really creative name.

Turns out Twenty was the best I could come up with. Anyway, lame name aside, it's minimally designed, fully responsive, built on HTML5/CSS3, and, like all my stuff, released for free under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Have fun!

Introduction

I have long been fascinated by 70mm film, which has significant advantages over 120 for medium format photography, even today. It is, in my opinion, a far superior format. Unfortunately, it was mostly a professional format, and amateur use has been limited by less available equipment and (more importantly) a lack of available information. 70mm can seem daunting to someone just starting out (or just curious about), as there has been no central source of information about the format. The best anyone could do up to now is cobble together bits and pieces of information from forums over the years.

This site is a labor of love. My hope is to share my knowledge of the format and help a new generation of photographers discover 70mm and learn all they need to know to acquire equipment and film, shoot it, develop it, and scan it. 70mm is not scary; armed with the right information, it is easier and cheaper to shoot than 120, and can make medium format photography more enjoyable.

I’m not just on a mission to introduce new shooters to the joys of 70mm. I also hope to form something of a community of 70mm shooters. A critical mass will enable us to unlock more developing options, to release new film stocks (yes, we can do that!), and general encouragement and advice. Join us!

All content on this site was written by me, Zach Horton . I’m a professor of media studies at the University of Pittsburgh. I am also the owner/operator of Mercury Works , a boutique camera company. Mercury Works was the first company to utilize 3D printing and other maker technologies to produce custom cameras. The Mercury camera system is the most versatile, modular camera system ever developed. It is compatible with thousands of lenses and all major recording formats from film to digital. Mercury Works is committed to making 70mm photography more accessible and has developed a number of products to that end.

How 70mm Works

70mm is a professional type of medium format film that consists of long rolls of film in a canister. It is 70mm in height, and generally 100ft (30.5 meters) in length.

However, 70mm film is usually shot in lengths of 13-15ft loaded into reusable metal cassettes. 70mm cassettes are like giant versions of 135 cassettes, though they are designed to be re-used again and again, not discarded. Each cassette has a cap at each end; you can open it from either end. Inside is cassette spool. Kodak’s version includes a metal film clip to attach film to the spool.

Linhof made their own version of these cassettes. The metal cassette itself was a re-painted and re-branded Kodak cassette, but they designed a different spool to go inside. The Linhof version doesn’t come with a metal clip. Instead it has a slot in which to insert, then bend, the end of your film.

One cassette holds the equivalent of about five rolls of 120 film.

Though the film is a bit larger than 120 film, the extra height was designed for perforations. Even though some 70mm film is perforated and some isn't, all 70mm film is designed to expose standard medium format height photos (approximately 56mm). Theoretically, then, 70mm film is compatible with any medium format camera that accepts removable backs.

Advantages of 70mm Film

The biggest advantage of 70mm is the ability to load larger rolls of film, so you don't have to reload very often. You can shoot five times as many shots per roll as you can with 120 film! There are many situations in which is is extremely advantageous.

In addition, 70mm film is a highly flexible, professional format. You can load as much film in a cassette as you wish: 120 length, 220 length, a full 15ft load, or anything in-between. Even better, the 70mm cassette system enables you to cut a roll short at any time. When you've completed a shoot, simply cut the film. The exposed film can be developed, while the unexposed film can be instantly reloaded into a new takeup cassette to continue shooting, or stored for the future, ready to shoot. See below.

Besides being shot in a traditional 70mm cassette, 70mm film can now be shot on large format and Mercury Stereo cameras in a Mercury 70mm Cut Film Back or a Grafmatic 45 .

Nowadays, another massive advantage of 70mm film is cost. While new film from Ilford will cost the same per exposure as 120, there are large supplies of 70mm film from the aerial and portrait industries that are routinely sold on Ebay for 20% to 25% of the cost of new 120 film. See the 70mm Film page for recommended film stocks.

70mm metal film cassettes do a much better job of protecting film from UV light and X-Ray scanners than the paper backing of 120 film. I have had 120 film ruined while 70mm film traveling beside it turned out fine.

A final advantage is that thanks to Mercury Works, it is now possible to shoot 65mm motion picture film (i.e., IMAX film) in all 70mm film backs! See the 65mm Film page for details!

Where to Start

You'll need the following to get started with 70mm:

• A medium format camera that accepts removable backs
• A 70mm back
• At least two 70mm cassettes
• A 70mm developing reel and tank, or a modified 120 reel for Paterson or Jobo
• If shooting 65mm, a set of Mercury 65mm spools (which insert in 70mm cassettes)

Mercury Works offers most of the essential items, as well as an extensive line of accessories, and the world's most complete supply of film, here .

Ebay is also your friend for vintage 70mm gear.

If you already own a compatible camera system, that's probably the best place to start.

If you are looking for a new camera specifically for 65/70mm, we recommend either a Hasselblad V camera (A70 backs are quite plentiful), or more affordably, a medium format camera that is compatible with the Mamiya RB67 70mm back (A Mercury Universal Medium Format camera for portable use or an RB67 for studio use), or a large format camera that uses the Graflok 45 back mount (the most common removable back system). To get the most out of a large format camera, you may want a panoramic 65/70mm back, made only by Mercury Works (see the Backs page for details).

Join the Mailing List!

Are you currently a 70mm shooter who would like to join a community of others to share information and learn about new releases of equipment and film? Or are you considering shooting 70mm and would like to know more?

Join the list via this form . Depending on the options you select, you'll receive infrequent emails from us with news about future guides, tips, processes, and social media gatherings related to your particular preferences. We will never spam you or share your information with a third party.

70mm Secrets – What it takes to bring a 70mm film to the big screen

The Irish Film Institute is incredibly proud to be the only cinema in Ireland with a working 70mm projector.

In a day and age when film projection has increasingly shuffled off in favour of digital cinema options, even the chance to catch a film on 35mm is a rare and special thing. 70mm quite simply offers up film double the size of that previously standard format – offering more detail in each and every frame of the presentation.

July is a landmark month for the IFI, with two titles being presented on 70mm. The first is Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff on the 15th of July. This film was originally shot on 35mm and the 70mm print is a ‘blow-up’ used for exhibition in the 80s. It provides impressive image quality and, just as importantly, extra room for a six track audio mix – the film won two Oscars for its Sound in 1984 so we can’t wait to hear it.

The second release is even more exciting – Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk . This is because Nolan is a film fanatic who insisted on shooting the entire production on celluloid, pretty much unheard of in modern times. Not only that but the British director of films like The Dark Knight and Interstellar had the clout to convince studio Warner Bros. to allow him to use on an extra large format – in this case a combination of IMAX 65mm and regular 65mm film stock.

This means Dunkirk is that truly rare beast; a new film shot using large format stock which is also getting released in that same format. If you’re wondering what the difference is between 65mm and 70mm, the larger number is the finished film reel once the audio track has been added. And you’ll hear the difference when we get Dunkirk running in Cinema 1 at the IFI from July 21st.

But first, the film has to be actually made up. While delivery of digital cinema is fairly easy, essentially amounting to a large capacity hard-drive from which the data is loaded onto our server, film is a very different proposition.

It all begins with the reels themselves being delivered in actual film cans. In the case of Dunkirk, that amounted to 5 reels and 109 minutes – it’s the shortest film Nolan has made since his first ever feature Following , released in 1998.

The reels have to be assembled so that they can run uninterrupted for the full feature length. And there are further complications down to the way the soundtrack is delivered – as a separate disk which has to be ingested and encoded.

Here’s a breakdown of the steps which our Projectionist Paul Markey had to go through to get Dunkirk ready for your eyeballs.

1.   Ingest the soundtrack (literally everything audio, music, dialog effects) from the DataSat (DTS) discs into the hard drive of the processor.  The film stock has a digital code along its edges which syncs up the film to the sound scape.

2. Prepare a long leader on a metal collar on which all the reels will be attached.  The leader allows us the lace up the projector and line up the image without having to touch the film stock itself.

3. Physically arrange the film cans in order before opening them up.  Keeps the process streamlined and reduces the chance of error.

4. Put on my special ‘Jazz Singer’ film handling gloves.

5. Every reel has a START and an END leader, like those 10, 9, 8, 7, 6… countdowns.  I keep the START leader on reel one as an extra bumper and splice it to the long booth leader I prepared on the collar. Then TRIPLE check all the rollers! Extremely important! So as the image or soundtrack won’t be damaged when I start the make up machine.  Now, ready for ignition.

6. The machine plates that first reel onto the projector ‘cake stand’ (so named as it resembles one).  The plating can run on pretty fast, but I kept it at a very lower gear for this print.

7. At the end of the reel I cut off the entire END leader right up to the image frame.  Then I prepped  reel two, cutting off the entire START leader up to the first image frame.  The end of reel one is then spliced onto the start of reel two, TRIPLE check the rollers again and start it up.

8. This process is repeated for all the reels (in this case five) until the print is a whole.

After that exhaustive process, the film is tested extensively to ensure every aspect of the projection is perfect for opening night. Polyester film prints tend to build up static as they run, which can – barring an hermetically sealed projection booth – attract dust from the air over time. We have cleaning procedures in place and will be doing our utmost to maintain the image throughout the run of the picture.

You’ll be able to see the results at the IFI from July 21st, and when you see those ending titles coming up, spare a thought for the work which goes into putting Christopher Nolan’s latest masterwork together for the ultimate big screen presentation!

Dunkirk is showing at the IFI exclusively in 70mm from Friday July 21st. Book your tickets here.

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‘Oppenheimer’ Isn’t the Only Christopher Nolan Film Playing in 70mm This Summer

Sarah shachat, associate craft editor.

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Much like the number of days with good air quality in New York City this summer, the number of films available as 70mm prints isn’t as high as perhaps it should be. This presents a challenge to the Museum of the Moving Image and its annual See It Big film series. But this year, the beloved Queens museum is capitalizing on interest in Christopher Nolan ’s “ Oppenheimer ” by including a print of “ Inception ” that allows viewers to go deeper into the film’s picture quality. 

At least that’s the theory. 

“In the case of ‘Inception, [the print was made] on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the film,” Choi told IndieWire. “Very little of ‘Inception’ was shot on 65mm — mostly special effects scenes, practical effects scenes, some of the larger, more spectacular moments in the film. And then there’s actually some aerial footage in ‘Inception’ that was shot on VistaVision, which was the same format that ‘Vertigo’ and ‘The Searchers’ were photographed on.” 

By rendering that footage onto a 70mm print, viewers should be able to see more detail and definition and have an even more immersive experience. “It really depends on what the printing elements were, what the basis for the 70mm print that they made was,” Choi said. “If it was just a 35mm inter-negative, then you are just basically blowing up everything. But if they actually went back to 70mm or VistaVision inter-negatives for those specific sequences and then pieced it together? That’s an interesting question.” 

Even the sound on a 70mm film print can have a quality all its own. While many newer prints use a soundtrack that acts more or less as a cue sheet that keeps the DTS (digital theater system) track playing through speakers synced to the images onscreen, older prints use magnetic strips. “Some people come out for that. They actually like the warmth of mag sound,” Hynes said. “It can be a different way of experiencing a film in person.” 

The theater at MoMI is also designed to provide a filmgoing experience that’s hard to replicate, even with a gigantic screen or home projector system. “One of the reasons I have loved our theater since well before I was working here is the fact that the screen, when it’s projecting 70mm or a widescreen format, [the film] fills the wall. It means that there is really no bad seat in the house,” Hynes said. 

For both Hynes and Choi, the enhanced interest in seeing films in 70mm has led to the opportunity to see even old films in new ways. “I’m excited for ‘Airport’ in particular because I’ve never seen it and it is a new print. Universal is one of the few studios that have made new prints,” Choi said. “There are a number of films that are blow-ups more recently. That’s the case with ‘ Boogie Nights ’ and ‘Inception.’ These are prints that were made, I think more or less, because the filmmakers wanted to.” 

Having filmmakers lionizing 70mm as an important format hasn’t led to massive gains in the number of prints in circulation, but Hynes and Choi think it has gotten more people interested in film as an in-person experience. “The rise of Film Twitter is almost entirely synced with the demise of film as the primary projected format in terms of exhibition,” Hynes said. “So film is something that a certain portion of the audience is going to fetishize and prioritize because it becomes rarer and it becomes recognized as more of a live, or alive, way of experiencing a film.” 

MoMI’s “See It Big: 70mm” film series runs August 3–27.

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, we have to go deeper: the 10th anniversary of inception.

“She became obsessed with the idea that our world wasn’t real, that she had to wake up to get back to reality.”

We’ve all felt a bit of displacement in 2020, the sense that the world around us isn’t real, that we’re in a dream from which we need to wake up. The timing of a newly-printed 70MM run of Christopher Nolan ’s “ Inception ” at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago is due to the film’s tenth anniversary and as a prelude to the release of the acclaimed director’s “Tenet,” but the film carries a different energy in our dreamlike state of Summer 2020. Everything does, really. However, watching “Inception” a decade after its release, one is struck by how remarkably timeless the film feels. It could easily come out today and make just as much money, maybe even more, which is not something that can often be said ten years after the release of a blockbuster, especially one as effects heavy as this one. What is it about “Inception” that makes it feel so current?

First, a confession: I turned down a chance to see the new print. I couldn’t do it. While I’m not going to judge someone who is ready to run back into movie theaters as the pandemic continues to thrive, I’m just not there. After much discussion with family, it actually came down to a simple argument. While my logical brain knows the chance that anything could happen is statistically insignificant—Music Box is doing an amazing amount to alleviate risk, including configuring their ventilation so it doesn’t recycle air and only pushes in fresh from outside—my emotional brain would have been too distracted to concentrate, not only during the screening but for days after, when every cough and sniffle would incite panic. I feel like I’ll be ready soon (although only for Music Box's extreme precautions). I wasn’t yet.

And there’s a certain irony in not being physically or emotionally ready for “Inception” specifically. After all, it’s about a man, Leonardo DiCaprio ’s Cobb, who is running from reality, digging deeper into levels beyond normal existence in an effort to flee his own grief, trauma, and blame. Nolan brilliantly spaces out revelations about Cobb’s purpose in his existential heist film. On one level, it’s a story about corporate intrigue, but that’s really a cover for the emotional arc of Cobb, who is dealing with his perceived failure to protect his wife, and belief that his action led to her suicide. Cobb is somehow both fleeing reality and trying to fix it at the same time. Who can’t relate to a sense of immobilized anxiety in 2020, in which we feel like we should be doing something but are stuck in our own forced routine? Or the idea that we have to push through something that feels like a bad dream to come out the other side?

Leaving aside my apprehension about seeing the film in theaters, a repeat viewing of “Inception” at home clarifies how many levels Nolan is working at the same time, much like the layered dream state of the narrative. On one level, it’s a whiz-bang action movie complete with set pieces that feel inspired by 007, especially in the final act. It’s an undeniably complex film narratively, even if that has been overblown—one that always feels like it’s a step ahead in terms of unpacking exactly what is happening—and yet it’s also a remarkably easy film to just let unfold, experiencing it beat by beat instead of trying to piece it altogether, much like, well, a dream. We don’t ask ourselves what dreams mean while we’re experiencing them—we simply ride them out. "Inception" works best when you're not trying to parse exactly what's happening and when, and you allow the emotion and action to carry the experience.

The reason it’s easy to get carried away by “Inception” is simple: it’s one of the most propulsive major blockbusters in history. It never stops. The stunning trick of “Inception” is how Nolan made such a talky film that never drags. It’s constantly explaining what it is and what it’s doing in a way that should grind it to a halt—over-exposition is the death of the action blockbuster—and yet Nolan balances that with such robust, passionate filmmaking. Whether it’s Wally Pfister ’s rich cinematography, one of Hans Zimmer ’s best scores, or Lee Smith's sharp-but-never-hyperactive editing, there’s confidence in every frame.

It’s also a film that, for better or worse, served as a tentpole for our puzzle box culture, one that loves to analyze and interpret art to extremes never imagined before the internet (go Google "Inception Ending Interpretations" and come back in about 12 hours). By the time he made “Inception,” Nolan had already fed this beast with films like “ Memento ” and “ The Prestige ,” but this takes it to another level by also serving as a commentary on puzzle box creation. “Inception” can very easily be read as a commentary on filmmaking. As Cobb and Ariadne ( Ellen Page ) work through the concept of dream construction, it echoes the way Nolan views his art, embedding each layer of the film with different ideas, maybe even working his own way into the viewer’s imagination. The dreamer, or viewer, can't know they're in a dream, much like the illusion of the film experience is best left unbroken. 

As Roger said, “The film's hero tests a young architect by challenging her to create a maze, and Nolan tests us with his own dazzling maze. We have to trust him that he can lead us through, because much of the time we're lost and disoriented.” Nolan loves to play with perception, and so a film about how what one sees and feels may be a construction is arguably the most perfect fit of creator and creation in his career to date.

One thing that really struck me watching “Inception” in 2020 was how certain I am that the movie would land with the same impact as it did ten years ago. This is rarely the case. CGI starts to look dated, a celebrity falls from grace, ideas grow stale—none of that happened to “Inception.” Part of it is how much Nolan has stayed current as a filmmaker with follow-ups like “ Interstellar ” and “ Dunkirk .” A blockbuster can often feel dated when it’s the last good thing that anyone involved made, but DiCaprio and Nolan are arguably more popular a decade later. It’s still breathtaking that a movie this complex made over $800 million worldwide and was nominated for Best Picture, but I am certain that both of those things would happen again if it was released in 2020. Well, maybe not in Summer 2020, but you get the idea.

So this is not a typical anniversary. Most of the time, these occasions feel like an opportunity for critical hindsight. They often come with words like “underrated” or, lately, “problematic.” What did people miss then? How does it play differently now? “Inception” defies this analysis, at least on its tenth anniversary. It’s still working its way through our imagination, something that feels even more important than it did when the film came out. Part of its brilliance is how much we’re all still kind of staring at that spinning top, waiting for it to fall.

For more information about the Music Box Theatre's special 70mm presentation of "Inception,"  click here

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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How ‘Oppenheimer’ Ignited an Explosion of 70mm

TheWrap magazine: Film-school administrators and a student weigh in whether the celluloid celebration is here to stay or merely a passing fad

A version of this story about the resurgence of celluloid presentation first appeared in the  College Issue of TheWrap magazine .

Judging from the lines snaking down the street at 70mm mini festivals taking place everywhere in the past few years — from NYC’s Paris Theater to Chicago’s Music Box Theatre to L.A.’s American Cinematheque theaters — one thing is abundantly clear: The love for celluloid is everlasting. But aside from the proper showcasing of “Oppenheimer,” “Licorice Pizza” and—and if you’re lucky, movies such as “Nope” and “Last Night in Soho” (and on the small screen, the beloved HBO series’ “Succession” and “ Euphoria ,” both film-shot programs), is the ongoing passion for celluloid reflected in current film school curriculum? In the age of digital everything, are future cineastes learning more about the tactile art of tape-handling and editing their work on Steenbecks?

Quite possibly more than you might think. Many institutions still regularly offer courses studying celluloid, particularly 35mm, including New York City’s The New School and Potsdam’s The Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg, and New York University’s graduate film program makes it an essential for first-year students, not to mention a study-away program every year in Prague that specializes in 35mm coursework. “You know, we never stopped it,” says NYU Associate Dean Kanbar Film & Television professor Michael Burke, “we love the rigor in the training of it that’s required for film.” Adds Burke’s colleague, Rosanne Limoncelli, Director of Production for Film and New Media at the Kanbar Institute at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, “It’s not required like it is in the grad program, but the undergrad students also have the opportunity. They take a cinematography class, they can do Super 16mm, they can continue on celluloid if they want to, or they can mix and match.”

Since becoming dean of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in 2021, Deborah LaVine has observed an uptick in students’ interest in celluloid. “Students love the materialism of it, they love the image that is produced on film, whether it’s black-and-white or color, whether it’s 16mm or 35mm,” she said. “And if it weren’t for the price, I think we would see many, many more student films made on celluloid.”

Ah, yes. The price. Shooting on film can be prohibitive on a student budget, considering the going rate of about $100 per 100 feet of 16mm film stock. Compare that to the cost of laboratory and equipment insurance fees universities can tack on (close to $1000 a semester in some cases), which and it’s easy to understand why cost alone can be an insurmountable hurdle. (The estimated cost of a student film can end up being upwards of $30,000 in many cases.)

Chapman University graduate film student Ben Lu loves celluloid, but he has been learning his craft primarily on digital since he was an undergraduate in Taiwan. This is not inherently a bad thing, since one of his cinematic heroes, a two-time Oscar-winning director of photography who received his 16 th Academy Award nomination last year, has embraced digital.

“Roger Deakins, around 2010, totally transformed from film to digital after shooting with the Arri Alexa (camera),” Lu said. “And (“Knives Out,” “Poker Face”) cinematographer Steve Yedlin , in a presentation, conducted numerous rigorous tests, controlling and operating the variables between digital and film. He showed digital and film side by side, the same exact same shots, and no one could tell the difference.”

But like all beautiful things, film stock is fragile and can wither away if not rigorously protected by archivists, who are integral to the cinematic ecosystem but are not as common as they once were. “Every archivist I know, a major part of their career is constantly re-justifying their existence,” said Matt Jones, associate curator of UNCSA’s impressive film archive, home to more than 30,000 assets including original film prints, trailers, and shorts, some of them original 70mm stock. “A lot of people talk a good game about archiving, but I don’t think it is a sexy cause that can pull down dollars very well. There are a few—your Scorseses and your Tarantinos—that really take it on as personal passion projects. But there’s not nearly enough of them to get it near where it needs to be.”

Still, the UNCSA team is adamant about keeping celluloid preservation alive. The school is so well known for its devotion to film perseveration that when Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” opened in a large number of 70mm and 70mm IMAX formats this past summer, the UNCSA archive department was tapped to train projectionists, since most non-repertory cinemas nowadays only use digital projection. (Jones and his colleagues have also been involved in recent 70mm presentations of Nolan’s “Dunkirk” and Tarantino’s roadshow presentation of “The Hateful Eight.”) “I always tell people when training them here, your first loyalty is to the print.” Further evidence of the school’s commitment: LaVine indicated that UNCSA, like NYU has currently, is looking into beginning a Master’s program for film archiving as soon as next year.

For Lu, Oliver Stone’s 1991 opus “JFK” is a great example of the power of celluloid, with its mix of various film stocks, sometimes within the same scenes, to tell the film’s panoramic tale. He hopes that interest in the artform continues, even if the current 70mm craze fades. “I feel like we have to preserve that history, but not be obstinate about that at the same time,” he said.

And Jones would love to give audiences a greater understanding about what the archival process means. “There’s a pretty baked-in misconception lots of people have where they use ‘archival’ as a synonym for ‘remastered’ and think, ‘Oh, it will be so much better than what we normally see,’” he said. “The truth is, an archival print is going to have all the scratches and the flaws of the lifetime of this print. I mean, you can have fantastic equipment with a very knowledgeable expert projectionist, and it can still go sideways at any time because you’re talking about a moving object that’s pulled through this mechanism. “But I guarantee you,” he added, “in those moments, no one is more interested in getting that show back on track than the projectionist.”

Read more from the College Issue here .

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Why You Should Go Out Of Your Way To See The Master In 70mm

A major topic of conversation surrounding Paul Thomas Anderson ’s The Master had nothing to do with the enthralling performances of Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, or even with the film’s obvious connections to Scientology. Film savvy audiences spoke about the need to see The Master in 70mm, Anderson’s preferred method of visual presentation.

But what, exactly, is 70mm presentation? How is this different than, say, IMAX (which several “event” movies like Mission Impossible : Ghost Protocol or the re-released Raiders of the Lost Ark prefer)? And where do you have to actually go to see Anderson’s opus in 70mm?

I was lucky enough to see Anderson’s film at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie screened in 70mm at the festival’s TIFF Bell Lightbox. I sat next to my good friend Jay Morong, a lecturer of Theater and Film at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who also has served as film programmer for the Charlotte Film Society and has been a film projectionist in Massachusetts and North Carolina for 16 years. After our Master screening, I picked Morong’s brain on the beauty of PTA’s vision, and the importance of 70mm projection. You can read what he had to say below, and if you still have questions, feel free to post them in the comments-- I'll do my best to answer them or go back to expert Jay for even more info.

OK, Jay, what, exactly, does 70mm mean?

70mm -- and we are talking 5 perforation 70mm, not IMAX 15 perforation 70mm -- is a large format film stock which produces a motion picture format that is twice the width of a standard 35mm film image. [ Editor's note: Perforations are the holes placed along the sides of each frame, which can be used to measure the height of a frame. The highest number right now is 15, which signifies an IMAX-ready frame. PTA's The Master , even in 70mm, is 5 perforations, and is not being screened in IMAX.] This creates an image area that is at least 3 times the size of standard 35mm. This means that the contrast, colors, and sharpness of the image are impeccable, and when projected on bigger screens there is little-to-no loss of picture quality.

It is (apart from true 70mm/15perf IMAX) the best image that can be presented on a motion picture screen. So that means 70mm is the best possible film medium for a filmmaker to use to get the clearest, cleanest, most vibrant image possible as an artist.

Cool. But is 70mm available in every major market? And if it isn't available at a local theater, why not?

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That depends what you mean by “major market.” The short answer is “No.” Most markets that I would consider “major markets” (New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco) all have 70mm, and some of these cities have multiple 70mm houses. (Boston, for example, has the Somerville Theater and the Coolidge Corner Cinema that can both show 70mm.) These cities are, of course, A Tier exhibition markets, so they never lost 70mm and still have it.

For the B and C markets, 70mm has been gone for a while. In fact, I believe the only 70mm in the entire state of North Carolina is housed at the North Carolina School for the Arts. So while 70mm still exists in most states, there are probably no more than 100 theaters (if that) in the country capable of presenting a film in 70mm.

The reason why this happened? Who knows, but my theory has to do with the shift of major theater chains from changeover booths -- where a union/experienced projectionist had to be present to change reels every 20 minutes or so -- to platter systems, where you build up the entire print on a platter and then press start once on a projector and the entire movie plays all the way through. Basically, the theater chains in the 1970s, and onwards, realized that with platter systems you could basically train anyone to run a show. Projection became less of a specialized skill for the chains. This in turn would help them get rid of union projectionists (a skilled labor job) and save them money, since the managers of the theaters could now do projection.

This also started the trend of substandard projection (out of focus, poor framing, dim bulbs, damaged prints) in theaters. It also meant you could build theaters with more screens (multiplexes) since there was less attention needed to run a film. You cannot run a 70mm print on a platter, so as more and more theaters switched to manager-operated projection booths, there was no skilled labor to run 70mm.

Eventually, over time, I think filmmakers and studios saw that this format wasn’t viable since their prints couldn’t be screened in houses, and they slowly abandoned the format. This of course didn’t happen overnight. It took decades. So you still had 70mm in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it slowly fizzled away as a viable film format for filmmakers.

When you watched The Master in 70mm, did you see a difference? What looked different? And how will it differ from a digital projection, if audiences can’t see it in 70mm as PTA wishes?

Let’s be honest: I sure like to think I did. Although some of it may be subconscious, since I love film formats so much. But that print looked amazing! The print was incredibly sharp, the colors were incredible, and the contrast between the lights and the darks was stunning! I think that is the key to the difference between digital projection and film projection.

Digital, for me, can never get the contrast exactly right. It is always a little muddied or grayed out. So you never get that real depth of field and those real good edges. Things just don’t pop in digital (especially if they were shot originally on film and then transferred to a digital format) like they do with a film print … and especially a 70mm film. If something is shot on film and then converted to digital, digital just cannot get the look of film correct. It can get close, but digital still cannot reproduce a film image exactly. Digital just cannot get the brightness correct in my opinion.

The bottom line for the screening of The Master is this: Watching a film shot in 70mm and then projected in 70mm by an experienced film projectionist means you are not going to get a better image than that, ever, in a cinema (except true 70mm/15perf IMAX). It is the best image there is. That is the highest resolution we have. You cannot get that at home, and digital cinema cannot replicate it. So while 2K or even 4K digital projection is what most people will see the film in -- and it will look great -- you are still miles away from the true celluloid image being presented at some theaters for this film. Click here for an up-to-date list of theaters capable of screening The Master in 70mm.

Sean O’Connell is a journalist and CinemaBlend’s Managing Editor. Having been with the site since 2011, Sean interviewed myriad directors, actors and producers, and created ReelBlend, which he proudly cohosts with Jake Hamilton and Kevin McCarthy. And he's the author of RELEASE THE SNYDER CUT, the Spider-Man history book WITH GREAT POWER, and an upcoming book about Bruce Willis.

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What Is IMAX With Laser, And Is It Worth Seeking Out For Oppenheimer?

To offer a brief introduction: IMAX is a large-format film presentation process that involved not just 70mm film projection, but outsize screens and deep stadium seating. The original IMAX projectors didn't run film from top-to-bottom like most projectors, but from left to right, requiring a novel invention to take care of the "flicker." Most film strips operate with quick-moving dowsers that flip open for a 24th of a second and then snap shut, allowing each frame of film to "pause" ever so briefly in front of the projector lamp. Without the flicker effect, a film strip would look like a quick-moving smear. The horizontal 70mm film feed of an IMAX projector required a new kind of "rolling loop" technology to accommodate the enlarged film and screen. "Rolling loop" is difficult to explain, but needless to say, it allowed for a smoother projection process. The creators figured their invention provided the maximum amount of visual information to date, and the word IMAX became their brand. No, "IMAX" doesn't stand for anything. It's a made-up word. 

IMAX movies began making the rounds, mostly at science museums, in the 1970s. The oldest IMAX theater in the country was built in San Diego in 1973 to provide planetarium shows. That theater is still operating to this day .

It wouldn't be until around 2002 that the IMAX format would start being used in earnest for mainstream Hollywood features. Some of the "Harry Potter" movies and "Superman Returns" had some of their scenes blown up into IMAX format. "The Dark Knight" famously shot scenes on IMAX cameras in 2008. It was at that time that IMAX started experimenting with digital presentation, leading hardcore film purists to cry foul. Also, some IMAX screens started shrinking to accommodate the "weaker" digital projectors, leading to the pejorative " lieMAX ." But in 2012, working with Kodak, IMAX aggressively upped their digital projection game and began to pioneer a laser-based projection system.

The laser system used two projectors simultaneously (something IMAX was already doing for its digital showings as well as its 3-D movies), and was powerful enough to fill an old-school IMAX-sized screen. To give the illusion of greater image resolution, the two projectors' images are presented with a half-pixel offset, leading to a deeper, more dynamic image. If you see a film advertised as "IMAX with LASER," rest assured that it will be on a traditionally large IMAX screen and not a lieMAX "kinda bigger than usual" screen. A traditional IMAX screen is at least 118 feet wide. 

Old-school projectors used xenon arc-lamps as their illumination source. IMAX with Laser uses, well, an enormous laser beam. The new projectors boast, according to IMAX marketing materials, 50% greater illumination and greater contrasts between blacks and whites. For many years, digital projectors struggled with presenting blacks without a certain degree of digital particulates appearing on screen. The new laser projectors remove the "digital haze." The laser projectors feature 4K resolution, which, it should be noted, is far less visual information than 70mm film. Visually translated, 70mm has 12K resolution (that is, 12,000 lines of visual information from top to bottom). 

It should also be noted that IMAX laser projectors can present films at 60 fps. Modern projectors are becoming so advanced that old-world 24-fps movies are starting to look odd and "jittery" when presented at their original frame rate. Like "Avatar: The Way of Water," more and more movies will likely have to shoot at higher frame rates to accommodate the evolving technology. 

Oppenheimer

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan brought IMAX into the mainstream in a big way with "The Dark Knight," so one might be thrilled to see his newest film, "Oppenheimer," in the same format. Nolan is famously a stickler for old-world filmmaking technology, advocating for film over digital. He has shot multiple scenes for most of his movies on large-format film and works with skilled cinematographers who know how to handle outsize cameras. 

While IMAX with Laser is an impressive format, allowing for bright images and amazing clarity, as stated above, it's still not quite as ineffably gorgeous as 70mm film. The 70mm film provides a near-indescribable "earthy" quality to the image, allowing for both clarity and visual "texture." The muted colors of a Nolan film really stand out, and the deep, wide images really capture the moody lighting of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (who also shot "Interstellar," "Dunkirk," and "Tenet" for Nolan). To witness the visual fidelity that Nolan and van Hoytema constructed, the ideal format to see "Oppenheimer" would be on 70mm film. 

Sadly, there are only 25 theaters in North America that offer 70mm presentations. A full list of those theaters can be found on Dextero's website . There are also three proper IMAX theaters in England, one in Australia, and one in the Czech Republic. 

Of course, IMAX with Laser is nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, if we begin to intensely fetishizing one format over another, and begin refusing ourselves access to formats we consider to be less than ideal, then we're robbing ourselves of film experiences. Even a limp, average-screen 2K digital projection of "Oppenheimer" will leave audiences feeling deep, nuclear existential dread and a distinct loss of faith in the morals of humanity. 

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Complete Guide to 70mm Film

• Thread starter rhizomeblur
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rhizomeblur

• May 5, 2023

I've published a new website devoted to 70mm film: www.shoot70mm.com It's been a massive undertaking, but a real labor of love, and includes a history of the format, information on all cameras/backs that take 70mm, information on most common 70mm film stocks, instructions for loading, developing, and modifying backs, and information on new products from Mercury Works to make shooting, developing, and scanning 70mm much easier and more accessible. With the huge surge in the popularity of analog photography, an entire generation (plus many in previous generations) are missing out on this format because information about it is so scarce. No central source of information for folks wanting to start shooting 70mm has existed until now (though there are some very helpful 70mm shooters in these forums). If you are curious about or have been wanting to start shooting 70mm, but haven't known where to start, this site is for you. If you are just interested in the history of the format, this site is for you. If you are a 70mm shooter looking to optimize or upgrade your workflow, this site is for you. Also, I'd appreciate any feedback, including corrections, comments, and suggested additions! This is basically the "official" thread for the site, and I welcome all feedback! I don't generally post much to forums, but will be watching and replying to this thread.  

Congrats! And thank you for adding value to the Internet. Funny how people always mention Hasselblads on the moon, and almost always they forget to mention that those were 70mm Hasselblads.  

Steven Lee said: Congrats! And thank you for adding value to the Internet. Funny how people always mention Hasselblads on the moon, and almost always they forget to mention that those were 70mm Hasselblads. Click to expand...

Our Firewall blocks the site (have to try when I am in a different network), but Firefox tells me the link above isn't encrypted. When using https:// in front of the link, the firewall still blocks it, but Firefox shows TLS encryption, but no authority. So I guess it is a self-signed certificate? You might want to try using a free one from Let's Encrypt, and enable forwarding to https from http.  

ant! said: TLS encryption Click to expand...

rhizomeblur said: Yes, it is encrypted (though it wouldn't matter, as it is not asking users for any information). I've updated the link to the encrypted version. Not sure what company you are at or why any firewall would block the site, but I hope you'll have a chance to access it from a different network. Click to expand...

ant! said: "Newly Observed Domain - Domains that are newly configured or newly active Click to expand...

116/616 film is also 70mm. A few years ago I purchased one of those 70mm cassettes (488) loaded with Panatomic-X. I re-loaded it onto a few 616 and 116 reels to use in my Kodak Monitor camera. I also use it in my Voigtländer 116 that I converted to a pinhole camera. For developing I have a 70mm stainless steel reel that fits in a standard stainless steel tank. I noticed that stainless reels are mentioned on the web site are too large for the standard size tank. Probably because the reel I have is for 116/616 film, a shorter length of film than you would need for the 15' of film in the 70mm cassettes.  

Zach, thanks for putting this together. I haven't read through all of the site yet, but already I've seen a lot of useful information. I have some of the necessary equipment, and film, and a couple of questions about 70mm developing reels. I can put together the Paterson reel kludge, but I'm interested in the NDT 70mm plastic reels. My questions are: - How big are these reels, specifically the outer diameter (ie what diameter tank/drum is needed)? - Do they load like a steel reel from the inside out (it doesn't look like a Paterson reel with pivoting halves)? - Does anyone have a good supplier to order a few reels from? When I've looked in the past, the reels are relatively inexpensive, but the industrial suppliers either have a large minimum order $ or extremely expensive shipping.  

BAC1967 said: 116/616 film is also 70mm. A few years ago I purchased one of those 70mm cassettes (488) loaded with Panatomic-X. I re-loaded it onto a few 616 and 116 reels to use in my Kodak Monitor camera. I also use it in my Voigtländer 116 that I converted to a pinhole camera. For developing I have a 70mm stainless steel reel that fits in a standard stainless steel tank. I noticed that stainless reels are mentioned on the web site are too large for the standard size tank. Probably because the reel I have is for 116/616 film, a shorter length of film than you would need for the 15' of film in the 70mm cassettes. Click to expand...

MCB18 said: on the Aviphot 200 section, it is worth noting that the film was made in both perforated and non-perforated lengths. There are 3 common lengths from what I can tell, 30.3 m (100 ft), 45.7 m (150 ft), and 85 m (275 ft). 30.3 m and 85 m are almost always perforated, while 45.7 almost never is. Click to expand...

reddesert said: Zach, thanks for putting this together. I haven't read through all of the site yet, but already I've seen a lot of useful information. I have some of the necessary equipment, and film, and a couple of questions about 70mm developing reels. I can put together the Paterson reel kludge, but I'm interested in the NDT 70mm plastic reels. My questions are: - How big are these reels, specifically the outer diameter (ie what diameter tank/drum is needed)? - Do they load like a steel reel from the inside out (it doesn't look like a Paterson reel with pivoting halves)? - Does anyone have a good supplier to order a few reels from? When I've looked in the past, the reels are relatively inexpensive, but the industrial suppliers either have a large minimum order $ or extremely expensive shipping. Click to expand...

70mm developing reel - Hocker Incorporated

Hi, from a strictly historical standpoint the specialized long-roll portrait cameras were probably the biggest users of 70mm film, at least in the US. If you're using the internet as your main source of info, it seems to be pretty much lacking in this respect. I've made a handful of posts about the use of these cameras. See the following link, along with a couple other links within that post. https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/any-former-processing-lab-people-out-there.175798/page-3 Personally I sorta see trying to use 70mm film today as something of an uphill battle. The infrastructure that once existed is nearly nonexistent and I sorta doubt there is enough demand for film manufacturers to even bother producing it.  

I finally managed to read a bit through the site from a different network. Interesting stuff, even though I doubt I'll ever use it... One camera back I see missing is the Pentax 645: https://www.pentaxforums.com/accessoryreviews/pentax-645-film-magazine-70mm-film.html  

Mr Bill said: Hi, from a strictly historical standpoint the specialized long-roll portrait cameras were probably the biggest users of 70mm film, at least in the US. If you're using the internet as your main source of info, it seems to be pretty much lacking in this respect. I've made a handful of posts about the use of these cameras. See the following link, along with a couple other links within that post. https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/any-former-processing-lab-people-out-there.175798/page-3 Personally I sorta see trying to use 70mm film today as something of an uphill battle. The infrastructure that once existed is nearly nonexistent and I sorta doubt there is enough demand for film manufacturers to even bother producing it. Click to expand...

I went nuts a few years ago. I have a 70mm bulk film loader. Works like any daylight loader. I have the Nikor reel and a tank, the tank doesn't allow for daylight filling, I just develop in the dark. I have an ex military Nikor Developing machine that I use to load the reel. Works great reel loads from the center out. I use my IR goggles ez as can be. The machine (stand) has provision for a motor, designed to spin dry the film on the reel. This machine was used for movie film 16 and 35 for sure. I think I have about 10 100' rolls of Plus-X aerial film. Most of the old Hasselblad backs have light leaks, I have a couple that are OK. I would walk around playing Neil Armstrong, zone focusing, and shooting electric from the waist. Armstrong carried the camera on the surface, there was another inside the LM. Apollo 11 was a Spartan mission, get there, grab some rocks, a couple pictures, Waste unbelievably valuable time talking to Richard Nixon, plant the flag and come home How no one got killed after the Apollo 1 fire is nothing short of a miracle. GO 70MM!!!  

ant! said: I finally managed to read a bit through the site from a different network. Interesting stuff, even though I doubt I'll ever use it... One camera back I see missing is the Pentax 645: https://www.pentaxforums.com/accessoryreviews/pentax-645-film-magazine-70mm-film.html Click to expand...

mshchem said: I went nuts a few years ago. I have a 70mm bulk film loader. Works like any daylight loader. I have the Nikor reel and a tank, the tank doesn't allow for daylight filling, I just develop in the dark. I have an ex military Nikor Developing machine that I use to load the reel. Works great reel loads from the center out. I use my IR goggles ez as can be. The machine (stand) has provision for a motor, designed to spin dry the film on the reel. This machine was used for movie film 16 and 35 for sure. I think I have about 10 100' rolls of Plus-X aerial film. Most of the old Hasselblad backs have light leaks, I have a couple that are OK. I would walk around playing Neil Armstrong, zone focusing, and shooting electric from the waist. Armstrong carried the camera on the surface, there was another inside the LM. Apollo 11 was a Spartan mission, get there, grab some rocks, a couple pictures, Waste unbelievably valuable time talking to Richard Nixon, plant the flag and come home How no one got killed after the Apollo 1 fire is nothing short of a miracle. GO 70MM!!! Click to expand...

mshchem said: think I have about 10 100' rolls of Plus-X aerial film. Click to expand...

• May 6, 2023

I’m fan of this format, I have had 3 616 cameras and still I own one Super Ikonta 530/15. I have still few HP5+ and loads of TriX of this format.  

Alex Varas said: I would love having that metal reel and tank for my 70mm film but I haven’t been lucky so far Click to expand...

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