Raiders of the Lost Cinerama

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Cinerama" - with these words Lowell Thomas welcomed the audience during the first screening of This Is Cinerama in 1952. It was finished literally just before the premiere, even the technicians haven't seen the whole film before. Suddenly the curtain opened up and the viewers found themselves on a roller coaster rushing down the tracks. Just like the Lumière brothers' train arriving at the station, this scene made cinema history and the film itself went on to become the biggest box office hit of that year.


Cinerama had to face the same challenge as today's incarnation of 3D. It was supposed to lure the viewers back into cinemas, after television gradually took them over. It went according to the plan - the audience fell in love with Cinerama, which revolutionized the cinematic experience only to disappear into thin air after a while. During the presentation Discovering the Lost Films of Cinerama, a group of experts and Cinerama lovers including an associate editor of American CinematographerJon Witmer, cinematographer Douglas Knapp and Dave Strohmaier, who restores films shot in this format, was trying to prove that Cinerama doesn't deserve to be forgotten.

Fred Waller was a founding father of Cinerama, an inventor, a cinematographer and a mechanical genius with over two thousand patents to his name. His dream was to create a device which would be able to simulate the scope of human vision. One of his first efforts was used by the allies during World War II. Step by step he further refined the system, getting rid of some of the projectors, streamlined down to three that were projected onto a 146 degree curve screen. He had high hopes for Cinerama: “It has to reproduce what a normal pair of eyes would see and a normal pair of ears would hear."

His format required superhuman patience and a constant bending of the rules. “A Cinerama production was a little like a traveling circus, carrying tons of equipment, moving through many countries, under challenging conditions, in planes, trains, boats, trucks, and some custom designed camera platforms" - said Douglas Knapp during the presentation. At first, mostly travelogues were shot in Cinerama, dramatic films appeared in the sixties - How the West Was Won and The Marvelous World of the Brothers Grimm.

A restored scene from "Cinerama "Holiday" (1955).
Flying through the Swiss Alps.
Gayne Rescher, ASC
William H. Daniels, one of the Cinerama cinematographers, once noticed that three lenses and three cameras meant that you were doing three times the work. The light would be distributed unevenly, true close-ups were not possible and neither was watching the dailies - in order to make any eventual changes one had to wait for the telegram from the laboratory. Therefore it shouldn't come as a surprise that Cinerama cinematographers needed to posses not only a good knowledge of the format, but also an adventurer's streak. The three-eyed beast forced them to take unusual risk and, as Jon Witmer said, they had to have an ability to trailblaze and figure things out as you go.

Harry Squire was a born adventurer and also a cinematographer on the most important films shot in this format, This is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday or Seven Wonders of the World. “He would constantly come up with new ways to mount the camera when on boats, planes, helicopters, on an aircraft carrier and of course on a roller coaster" - said Douglas Knapp laughing. During the presentation some other names were mentioned as well: John F. Warren, Paul C. Vogel, William H. Daniels, Joseph LaShelle, Charles Lang, Joseph Brun and, last but not least, Gayne Rescher, who would do everything for a perfect shot. His actions weren't dissimilar to stunts, and he almost died during the sequence shot on Swiss slopes for Cinerama Holiday: “The idea was that we had fifty skiers in front of the camera then we had fifty skiers following the camera (...) Swiss ski patrol was helping us out, it took some two pairs of skis to make the slit, tie it all together and make the thing. Beautiful job, but I wanted to put brakes on it. And they said: no, no, you don't need brakes. There will be two poles coming out of the back and two strongest skiers would steer it in the right direction. That didn't work out. They didn't realize that there was a 250 pound camera, a cameramen, batteries and other stuff. (...) The thing started to go faster and faster, and these fifty skiers that were in front of us - we passed all of them. The fifty skiers at the back - we never saw them at all. And I'm flying along, and they can't stop it. And they keep yelling back and forth something about the cliff ahead. So they are yelling at me that they are going to try and turn it, but they were a bit afraid to turn it at this speed. They were right - as soon as they started to turn, the downhill ski dug in and the whole thing was thrown up in the air, myself included. I landed fortunately in the soft snow. The Swiss skiers said there were never as fast on skis before. We had a wild ride" - he recalled after many years.

The intrepid Cinerama crew with the restored camera on the first day of shooting "In The Picture,"
the first film photographed in Cinerama since 1962
Cinerama can be still viewed as a challenge, also when it comes to the restoration process. As Dave Strohmaier observed, here usual rules just don't apply. Every shot needs a different treatment, because each one of the stripes changes in a different way. With the help of modern technology and special software, such as for example Digital Ice and Boris Flicker Fixer, Strohmaier and his colleagues work relentlessly on fixing all the damages caused by time, improper storage and...a mean fly. In order to get rid of an unwelcome guest from Seven Wonders of the World, David Strohmaier had to paint over the fly frame after frame. “We didn't totally get rid of it, because it's a part of Cinerama history, that pesky fly. So we minimized it as much as possible so that your eye didn't go to the fly, like it probably did in the original days when it run in theatres. That was probably one of the most difficult shots, it runs for 45 seconds and it probably took two days to paint that fly out. Something I don't want do every day, that's for sure."

At the end of the presentation the restored fragments of Cinerama Holiday and South Seas Adventure were shown in Smilebox, a format which works both on a curve screen and on a normal screen while preserving the feeling of immersion into an image. A sea-sickness inducing scene showing a floating raft down the Indus river, which cost one crew member his life, or unusual bungee jumping practiced by an African tribe in order to show that men are stronger and better than women fully confirmed that in a forgotten format there is still a flicker of life. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Cinerama.

Marta Bałaga
Camerimage