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Originally Posted by Mike Frezon
And, I need one of you film experts to explain to me why, if Bertolucci and Storaro wanted to the film to be released 2:1, they would have shot it in a wider format.
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What Storaro and Bertolluci are struggling against is the fact
there are no standardised camera or projection formats that have a 2.00:1 aspect ratio. So instead they want us to believe that they used 35mm anamorphic Technovision, which has a 2.4:1 A.R., but were composing for a 2.0:1 section inside of that format.
I think this is crazy for lots of different reasons. Wouldn't it of been easier to shoot 1.85:1, but crop the top and bottom? Or Super 35, and crop the top and bottom? It just doesn't add up shooting a film in 35mm anamorphic if you intend to hack off ~17% of the image.
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Originally Posted by Mike Frezon
Is the 70mm the closest you can get to 2:1 without being under? If so, why wouldn't their wishes have been taken into account. These guys had reputations back then, similar to what they have now, didn't they?
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You are correct in saying that 70mm is closest to 2:1 without going under. Films projected from 70mm prints have a 2.21:1 aspect ratio. You can see an image from a piece of
70mm alignment film here. There are only two exceptions to this - Ultra Panavision films, which are anamorphic, so the ratio is 2.76:1.
The other exception is that it is possible to convert 1.85:1 films to 70mm by placing black bars down the sides of the 2.21:1 image, thus cropping away the width to produce the narrower ratio. This is not common, but it has been done for Jacques Tati's film Playtime, Cameron's Aliens, and I believe Spike Lee's film Malcolm X. Surely others can think of more 1.85:1 films blown up to 70mm prints.
If Storaro REALLY wanted to preserve the 2:1 aspect ratio of The Last Emperor on 70mm prints, they could've made such "non-standard" 70mm prints with bars down the sides. Thus cropping the 2.21:1 image down to 2.00:1. I see absolutely no reason why a big laboratory doing work for Storaro / Bertolluci on a very expensive production wouldn't of done this.
Others have pointed out to me that perhaps the only problem is that some theatres have curtains that can only move to 1.33, 1.85, 2.2 and 2.4 ratios. 2:1 could cause problems for some theatres. But most cinemas would just compromise and leave the curtains at the 2.2 spot.
Now the fact they didn't make 2:1 prints suggests to me that this whole 2:1 business is an afterthought, and that they were perfectly happy with the film being presented at 2.21:1 - the standard 70mm aspect ratio. If that is the case, why couldn't they present it at 2.21:1 on DVD? To me that would've been a perfect compromise between 2.4 and 2.0.
Incidentally, they could've also had 35mm prints cropped at the sides to preserve a 2:1 ratio. However, this would've required an optical printing step which would've degraded the quality somewhat, so it is understandable that this was avoided, but that meant they couldn't avoid the 2.4:1 35mm anamorphic ratio.
To make the 70mm prints from the 35mm original going through an optical printing step is unavoidable (you need to remove the anamorphic distortion, and make the image bigger for a new 65mm element that the 70mm prints are made from). So they could've cropped the image to 2:1 at that point, producing 70mm prints with black bars down the sides of the image.
The last thing to remember is that Bertolucci contractually had to produce a 1.33:1 version for television. Given that fact, it would've made a lot more sense to shoot the film in
non-anamorphic Super 35 if they wanted to protect for both 2.00:1 and 1.33:1. They could've preserved roughly the same width of the image on both versions, but just opened the matte for the TV version, thus avoiding panning and scanning. It would've looked a bit strange with extremely loose compositions on the TV version (It would've looked like a 1940s film, which isn't a bad thing). But it would've avoided cropping the image at all on the 35mm and 70mm versions. Super 35 inherently requires an optical printing step (or now a digital intermediate) so that would've made it easy to set the image to 2:1, rather than the usual 1.85:1, ore more commonly, 2.4:1.
