Widescreen Cinema (Harvard Film Studies)

Rating:
Summary: Best source of information of this type.
Review: John Belton, historian and cinema guru at Rutgers University, has put together a very valuable reference in this book. It contains chapters on the development of the early widescreen processes; Cinerama, CinemaScope, 70mm Todd-AO, and others. Belton traces the geneology of widescreen imagery to art works predating the cinema by hundreds of years. This is the most thorough and accurate source of information in this field I've ever encountered. As a historical treatise, it is vastly superior to "Wide Screen Movies" by Carr and Hayes, which relies largely on the recollections of the authors, and contains numerous misstatements and inaccuracies.