The origins of CinemaScope can be found in France, in professor Henri Chrétien’s (1879-1956) Hypergonar. The process consisted in a system of anamorphic (from the Greek for forming anew) lenses used to compress in width the images to be exposed on the film. With the aid of a complementary system, the images were then brought back to their normal ratio during projection. As a result, the portion of the scene that was filmed and projected was twice as wide as normal, without however losing luminosity or definition, and continuing to use square frames. The equipment included a converging system of two lenses during shooting, and a diverging, three-lens system during projection. When filming, the two lenses could be adjusted according to the depth of the scene, while the projection lenses had fixed positions that depended on the projection distance and the width of the screen. The first patent was obtained by Chrétien on 9 December 1926, for color photography; application to widescreen followed on 29 April 1927. The use of Hypergonar within the cinema did not obtain the desired success, also because the first feature films that used it were released around the same time as the advent of sound. Twenty eight years went by before Mr. Darryl Zanuck came to France to buy Chretien’s Hypergonar.

Federico Magni