70 mm film
70 mm film is a wide high-resolution film gauge for motion picture photography, with a negative area nearly 3.5 times as large as the standard 35 mm motion picture film format. As used in cameras, the film is wide. For projection, the original 65 mm film is printed on film. The additional 5 mm contains the four magnetic stripes, holding six tracks of stereophonic sound. Although later 70 mm prints use digital sound encoding, the vast majority of existing and surviving 70 mm prints pre-date this technology.
Each frame is five perforations tall, with an image aspect ratio of 2.2:1. The use of anamorphic Ultra Panavision 70 lenses squeezes an ultra-wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio horizontally into that 2.2:1 imaging area. To this day, Ultra Panavision 70 produces the second widest picture size; surpassed only by Polyvision, which was only used for 1927's Napoléon.
With regard to exhibition, 70 mm film was always considered a specialty format reserved for epics and spectacle films shot on 65 mm and blockbuster films that were released both in 35 mm and as 70 mm blow-ups. While few venues were equipped to screen this special format, at the height of its popularity most major markets and cities had a theater that could screen it. Some venues continue to screen 70 mm to this day or have even had 70 mm projectors permanently or temporarily installed for more recent 70 mm releases.
History
Films formatted with a width of 70 mm have existed since the early days of the motion picture industry. The first 70 mm format film was most likely footage of the Henley Regatta, which was projected in 1896 and 1897, but may have been filmed as early as 1894. It required a specially built projector built by Herman Casler in Canastota, New York and had a ratio similar to full frame, with an aperture of by. There were also several film formats of various sizes from 50 to 68 mm which were developed from 1884 onwards, including Cinéorama, started in 1900 by Raoul Grimoin-Sanson. In 1914 the Italian Filoteo Alberini invented a panoramic film system utilising a 70 mm wide film called Panoramica.Fox Grandeur
In 1928, William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation, in personal collaboration with Theodore Case as the Fox-Case Corporation, began working on a wide film format using 70 mm film which they named Grandeur. Cameras were ordered by Fox-Case from Mitchell Camera Corp, with the first 70 mm production cameras, designated as the Mitchell Model FC camera, delivered to Fox-Case in May 1929. This was one of a number of wide-film processes developed by some of the major film studios at about that time. However, due to the financial strains of the Great Depression, along with strong resistance from movie theater owners, who were in the process of equipping their theaters for sound, none of these systems became commercially successful. Fox dropped Grandeur in 1930.Todd-AO
Producer Mike Todd had been one of the founders of Cinerama, a wide-screen movie process that was launched in 1952. Cinerama employed three 35 mm film projectors running in synchronism to project a wide image onto a deeply curved screen. Although the results were impressive, the system was expensive, cumbersome and had some serious shortcomings due to the need to match up three separate projected images. Todd left the company to develop a system of his own which, he hoped, would be as impressive as Cinerama, yet be simpler and cheaper and avoid the problems associated with three-strip projection; in his own words, he wanted "Cinerama out of one hole".In collaboration with the American Optical Company, Todd developed a system which was to be called "Todd-AO". This uses a single 70 mm wide film and was introduced with the film Oklahoma! in October 1955. The 70 mm film is perforated at the same pitch as standard 35 mm film. With a five-perforation pull-down, the Todd-AO system provides a frame dimension of 1.912 inch by 0.87 inch giving an aspect ratio of 2.2:1.
The original version of Todd-AO used a frame rate of 30 per second, 25% faster than the 24 frames per second that was the standard; this was changed after the second film – Around the World in 80 Days - because of the need to produce 35 mm reduction prints from the Todd-AO 65 mm negative. The Todd-AO format was originally intended to use a deeply curved Cinerama-type screen but this failed to survive beyond the first few films. However, in the 1960s and 70s, such films as The Sound of Music and Patton were shown in some Cinerama theaters, which allowed for deeply curved screens.
Todd-AO adopted a similar multi-channel magnetic sound system to the one developed for Cinemascope two years earlier, recorded on "stripes" of magnetic oxide deposited on the film. However, Todd-AO has six channels instead of the four of Cinemascope and due to the wider surround stripe and faster film speed provides superior audio quality. Five of these six channels are fed to five speakers spaced behind the screen, and the sixth is fed to surround speakers around the walls of the auditorium.
Panavision and the 65/70 mm format
Panavision developed their own 65/70 mm system that was technically compatible and virtually identical to Todd-AO. Monikered as Super Panavision 70, it used spherical lenses and the same 2.2:1 aspect ratio at 24 frames per second. Panavision also had another 65 mm system, Ultra Panavision 70, which sprang from the MGM Camera 65 system they helped develop for MGM that was used to film Raintree County and Ben-Hur. Both Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65 employed an anamorphic lens with a 1.25× squeeze on a 65 mm negative. When projected on a 70 mm print, a 1.25× anamorphic projection lens was used to decompress the image to an aspect ratio of 2.76:1, one of the widest ever used in commercial cinema.Decline and resurgence
Due to the high cost of 70 mm film and the expensive projection system and screen required to use the stock, distribution for films using the stock was limited, although this did not always hurt profits. Most 70 mm films were also released on 35 mm film for a wider distribution after the initial debut of the film. South Pacific, Lawrence of Arabia, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music are well-known films widely shown in 70 mm format with a general release in 35 mm format. 70 mm film received a brief resurgence in the 1980s when it became popular to make "blow-up" prints of 35 mm titles. It had another resurgence in the mid-2010s with the release of The Master, The Hateful Eight and Dunkirk, with a small number of venues getting temporary or permanent 70 mm film projectors in order to be able to screen these titles. Quentin Tarantino, in particular, led a successful campaign to have the equipment required to show The Hateful Eight in Ultra Panavision installed in 100 cinemas worldwide.Blow-ups
The 35 mm to 70 mm "blow-up" process produces 70 mm release prints from 35 mm negatives, so that films shot on the smaller format could benefit from 70 mm image and sound quality. This process began in the 1960s with titles like The Cardinal and continues up until the present day, with the height of its popularity being in the 1980s. These enlargements often provided richer colors, and a brighter, steadier and sharper image, but the main benefit was the ability to provide 6-channel stereophonic sound as most theaters before the mid-70s were screening 35 mm prints with single channel monaural sound. However these "blow-ups" rarely used the full six channels of the Todd-AO system and instead used the four-track mixes made for 35 mm prints, the additional half-left and half-right speakers of the Todd-AO layout being fed with a simple mix of the signals intended for the adjacent speakers or simply left blank. If a 70 mm film was shown in a Cinerama theatre, the Cinerama sound system was used. From 1976 onwards, many 70 mm prints used Dolby noise reduction on the magnetic tracks but Dolby disliked of the "spread" and instead re-allocated the 6 available tracks to provide for left, center and right screen channels, left and right surround channels plus a "low-frequency enhancement" channel to give more body to low-frequency bass. This layout came to be known as "5.1" and was subsequently adopted for digital sound systems used with 35 mm.In the 1980s the use of these "blow-ups" increased with large numbers of 70 mm prints being made of some blockbusters of the period such as the 125 70 mm prints made of The Empire Strikes Back. However the early 1990s saw the advent of digital sound systems for 35 mm prints which meant that 35 mm could finally match 70 mm for sound quality but at a far lower cost. Coupled with the rise of the multiplex cinema, which meant that audiences were increasingly seeing films on relatively small screens rather than the giant screens of the old "Picture Palaces", this meant that the expensive 70 mm format went out of favour again. The DTS digital sound-on-disc system was adapted for use with 70 mm film, thus saving the significant costs of magnetic striping, but this has not been enough to stop the decline, and 70 mm prints were rarely made.
Among some of the more recent 70 mm blow-up titles are Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza, Patty Jenkins's Wonder Woman, Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One and Brady Corbet's The Brutalist.
Current use
From 1970, the usage of 65 mm negative film drastically reduced, although the Soviet Union continued to use it frequently until the end of the 1980s. This was in part due to the high cost of 65 mm raw stock and processing. Some of the few films since 1990 shot entirely on 65 mm stock are Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, Ron Fricke's Baraka and its sequel, Samsara and Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. Some titles used a mixture of 5-perf and 15-perf 65 mm stock, including Christopher Nolan's films Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer, and Ryan Coogler's Sinners.Other titles with a significant amount of 65 mm footage include Ron Howard's Far and Away, Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar.
Since the 2010s, most movie theaters have converted to digital projection systems, resulting in the removal of both 35 mm projectors and 70 mm projectors. However some venues and organizations remain committed to screening 70 mm film, seeing the special format as something that can set them apart and be an audience draw in an industry where most movies are screened digitally.
70 mm film festivals continue to take place regularly at venues such as The Somerville Theatre in Somerville, Massachusetts, The Music Box Theatre in Chicago, the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon, the American Cinematheque's Aero and Egyptian Theaters in Los Angeles, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, among others.