Report by PAN reader Steve Bergson, a freelance content researcher/producer – scroll down for Steve’s in-depth overview of this new platform.
An exciting new project has been launched to develop an online visual and geographic encyclopaedia of film formats and processes – all the myriad that have ever been tried out over the entire cinema history. Film Atlas is a collaboration between the FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) and the George Eastman Museum, funded by the Louis B. Mayer Foundation. The stats are impressive: archives from twenty-five countries have come together to produce a galaxy of newly-commissioned essays with over a thousand illustrations to document at least six hundred and fifty different formats and processes, all on a plan reaching to 2032. In the words of the project leader James Layton, the site is “a showcase for the unique and varied holdings of archives around the world.”
Given this is naturally quite a specialist resource, the Atlas still aims to appeal not just to the archivist or film historian, but the general public as well. As Layton says: “The end user can be anyone.” But as film historian Luke McKernan has pointed out, the average movie watcher has seldom seen, or much cared about, how the film they are experiencing is formed. Many are aware that films come in different sizes, “but of perforations, bases, emulsions, frame rates or aspect ratios few will know or worry.” There is an educational role here then, but it is folded into the specific focus of the site which Layton says: “hopefully works on many levels, from a gallery of beautiful images to a rigorous catalogue of film formats.”. An interesting idea.
With the current attention, the cultural zeitgeist is playing to how an increasingly digital world is framing the real one – with the profusion of “content” that ranges from IMAX to vertical TikTok clips viewed on phones – this resource could form the useful bridge between the academic and consumer that the project’s ambitions are trying to encompass. As Layton puts it: “I think the site shows that filmmakers have always had the tools to accomplish their artistic goals.” Technical limitations always have – and most likely – always will inspire innovation. By charting the journey so far, the Film Atlas might supply a guide to the future.
Framing the Movies – an Atlas Films platform deep-dive overview by Steve Bergson.
According to the Film Atlas project’s leader James Layton, the famous American film director John Ford used over his long career, “nine different colour processes, ten aspect ratios and film formats, and at least four different types of soundtrack (in addition to silent film).” Given that Ford was one of the horse riders to feature in that seminal early movie, DW Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and made movies into the 60’s, this film stature pedigree is nothing if not solid, but the range of formats in this one example does at least show the vast field this new online resource is trying explore and map.
Film Atlas is an online encyclopaedia of film formats, launched in May, with a truly global reach. A collaboration between the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and the George Eastman Museum, with funding from the Louis B. Mayer Foundation, the George Eastman Museum Publishing Trust Endowment, and FIAF’s Eileen Bowser Memorial Fund, this website is essentially a sumptuously illustrated directory of all of the physical forms in which film has ever graced a screen of some kind. Coinciding with the British Film Institutes’s Film is Film season which celebrates the plastic medium of film itself, the project’s launch is as spot-on in its timing as a film gauge.
Even if the user has little idea or concern about the nerdfest specifics of sprocket holes and film processes, this kind of background context for a movie still has a bearing on how they consume media, even in these days of digital manipulation where a piece of content can be any shape or form you want it to be…..or more likely, how the filmmaker, studio, broadcaster, platform or content creator wants it to look. Long overdue then, this is a reference and guide where you have to wonder how has this resource now come about?
In terms of the means to achieve the project, which is scheduled to be completed by 2032, and its potential, Layton says: “Funding permitting, we plan to create several videos for the site as different gateways into the essays and to provide basic primers to the main concepts of the site. Perhaps one for each of our main categories: colour, formats, 3-D and sound.”
Film Atlas is essentially a catalogue, index or database of useful elements. It might be easy to think this is a dry academic resource, each entry naming the particular format, with a date range, and a short summary of the nature of the format but every part has been carefully considered and designed. There are descriptors of the use, principal inventors, related companies, locations of production, countries of use and the format categories and a world map pinpointing the centre of its production and the countries of use. Dig a bit deeper and the user can find film formats examined with close-up images of examples of the format and details of – among other things – gauge, frame size, aspect ratio, perforation type, emulsion, edge markings, frame rate, number of projected frame strips and where appropriate, colour details.
This is all important information which in the digital domain would be termed metadata about an asset but it is admittedly quite specialist. There is also here an illustrated essay on the rise and fall of the particular medium and a select filmography of the most notable titles made using the format. Technical details are accompanied by stills and sometimes video clips. There’s also a list of references with for example, patents – and links to other related formats in this maze of ingenuity. There are plans to go further with the navigation. Layton says: “We also want to develop a lineage tree to visually display the evolution of different technologies and the relationships between entries. And we hope to develop several tools over time to better integrate the site into teaching/classroom use and the museum visitor experience.”
This makes for an ambitious project. Film Atlas is a specialist resource, assembled with impressive attention to detail by Layton with Crystal Kui and Margaux Chalançon but there is no doubting its ambition to go beyond the academic world. And it really does need to bridge the gap from archive to the more general public – or that part of it with an interest in movies, which is most of it. For better or worse, film is now very much a legacy format, used by directors from time to time to achieve particular effects but the tech history still has a huge bearing on current media in a way that the mechanics of say, sound recording does not. There is a debate about analogue versus digital in audio of course, but film is not yet gone the way of the phonograph, possibly because we are still very much bound up with issues about field of vision and how these are shown on the screen, whatever its size. This makes all this accessible data more relevant. Recent movies – whether it’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ or ‘La Chimera’ use different film formats within the same story to put across different film viewing experiences, whether the audience is consciously aware of this or not.
Cognitive psychology can delve into the ways our brains can adjust to the screen in front of our eyes, so vertical TikTok framing finds an audience as easily as an IMAX title that overwhelms its viewers in a pre-VR universe. It’s deceptively tempting for older generations to dismiss TikTok as lacking high art cred but its worth is possibly actually demonstrated in its interaction with tech. Different paradigms might apply, an aesthetic reset needed. After all, the fundamental principles – how to grab a viewer’s attention and tell a story – connect today’s content creators with the cinema’s original filmmakers. Any format can be made to work whether it is channelled through in-the-palm intimacy or vast screens dominating our field of vision. It’s all looking at screens.
It seems a tad ironic then that it is the digital domain’s qualities of flexibility combined with burgeoning computer power – the thing that’s fuelling Gen-AI – that might supply the answer to the question of what is the intended purpose of an online database in these days when bots and agents are set to work on finding stuff for the researcher or writer of prompts. The majority of the film formats catalogued in the Film Atlas may largely now be relics, as museum-worthy as a gramophone, but in a world inundated with design skeuomorphs like sprocket holed film reels, we do seem to need to keep grounded in some kind of reality, even if it is one essentially only conjured by the current state of our perception. This makes the reference to the origins of the tech and art form rather important.
In describing the construction of this website, James Layton says: “We have put a lot of effort into making or obtaining the best quality digital reproductions to illustrate the project, most newly made by over fifty international archives.” For the future wellbeing of the enterprise, the outreach to the public needs to be successful, so the aims are as wide ranging as a marketeer’s even if the methods are as tightly disciplined as an archivists. “We want the public to actually be able to see and study these samples up close rather than by poorer-quality reproductions found in some older publications and history books.” says Layton. History is strewn with examples where the technical limitations of expression at any given moment in history act as a spur to artistic innovation. Hence Layton can say overall: “the site shows that filmmakers have always had the tools to accomplish their artistic goals.” Not only is this framework a useful reference then; it also encourages us to take onboard – even possibly only at an unconscious level – the way we interact with movies and beyond, the whole digital domain. That’s useful education even Eisenstein would have approved.