The Hidden Architecture of CinemaScope Set Design

Almost seventy years after the popular success of CinemaScope film, The Robe, inaugurated widescreen era, there remains little critical understanding design logic wide format films. Drawing on evidence gained from an examination nearly two hundred films, this essay focuses earliest How to Marry a Millionaire (completed before Robe but released it), offer radical re-thinking how set is key aesthetics. illustrates how, very beginning production, pair grids were used determine composition frame and placement actors within it, jobs that normally ascribed director. Thus, far being mere background, grid-defined film sets add general sense heightened interconnectedness that, like narrative plot, satisfy viewer’s desire for order coherence.