Gauging Film History: An Exquisite Corpse

Abstract

Gauging Film History:An Exquisite Corpse Ina Archer (bio), Dino Everett (bio), Marsha Gordon (bio), and Martin Louis Johnson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Collage of 3 mm, 8 mm, 8.75 mm, 9.5 mm, 16 mm, 17.5 mm, 22 mm, 35 mm, 65 mm, and 70 mm. Arranged and photographed by Dino Everett, HMH Foundation Archivist, University of Southern California. [End Page 126] If the history of film is a history of creative expression and experimentation, it is also a history of technical innovations, standards, and practices. Of these, the width, or gauge, of film is one of the most critical, if often neglected. While film gauges were—by and large, and with important exceptions—standardized very early in an effort to make film an interoperable, international technology, producers and equipment manufacturers continued to experiment with film gauge, making films wider and narrower to achieve various exhibition-related objectives. Over time, film gauges became associated with modes of display, sites of exhibition, and specific uses of the medium. Unlike other film histories, the history of film gauges is not a story of growth from small to large, low to high, or local to global. Instead, film gauge confounds these narratives, offering us a history of dead and loose ends. What follows is a series of lilliputian lamentations, tiny tributes, half-pint histories, elfin elegies, mini manifestoes, and petit poems on the history of film gauges, starting with the widest gauge (125 mm) and ending with the smallest (3 mm). It was produced in the Surrealist spirit of an Exquisite Corpse: our team met once on Zoom to establish and discuss the rules that would guide our respective entries, which we did not share with each other until the entire piece was drafted in our separate corners. We assigned each participant a set of gauges on a 1-2-3-4 basis, rotating writers as we went from the widest to the narrowest, with each entry written to the precise word count for the gauge. For some entries (17.5 mm, 9.5 mm) this meant writing to the half-word. We agreed that we could be expansive in our entries but that we would discuss no gauge other than the one assigned. We did not see each other's contributions before our second and final meeting, when we revealed our pieces all at once through the simultaneous magic of a Google doc and a spirited recitation in the round. 125 Cinema is ephemeral, all light and shadows, darkened rooms and fixed gazes. Film is tactical, plastic, and fragile. When we hold film up to the light, our fingers are separated by its width, or gauge, allowing us to see the frame, unobstructed. While images can be made smaller or larger through lenses and throws, the gauge remains constant. Or does it? What is the history of the gauge, that standard that is not as standard as we assume? What do we make of the edge cases of something defined by its edges? Edges such as 125 mm, almost 5 inches, a gauge first patented by Herman Schlicker in 1914, designed to contain as many images as possible, some 1,664 on a roll of safety film. [End Page 127] 75 The 75 mm gauge was developed by the Lumière brothers for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The idea was to create a larger format in order to provide greater clarity when it was projected on a larger screen. The camera was built and ten negatives were shot; however, the projector was never completed. There was a typo in the Brian Coe book of Movie Photography that suggested Todd-AO prints were 75 mm, but that is false. 70 I'm among the earliest and widest to gaze at the cityscape. I'm the grandest and in my grandeur I grew from no perfs to 4, epically accommodating the coming of sound. You can positively BLOW me up to twice my negative size because I'm a Mad Mad Mad Mad format. Superlative plus high, wide, and handsome in my mid 50s—monikered Todd-AO, Ultra, Super, Panavision, and IMAX in my 70s...