The concept of watching a film on Full –Length Widescreen was first developed in Hollywood by 20th Century-Fox studios. In India, filmmakers worked with 35mm screens until the mid-’70s, with empty space on either side. However, Guru Dutt’s experience watching a Hollywood film on a full wide screen left a lasting impression—the panoramic scenes and image quality were mesmerizing. This sparked his interest in the technology behind it, known as CinemaScope.
Guru Dutt’s Visionary Experiment: Kaagaz Ke Phool
Guru Dutt and his cinematographer V.K. Murthy came to know that the technique uses a unique lens that is placed in front of the film projector in cinema houses.The unique lens enlarges images from normal 35mm film to full scale, blowing them up across the gigantic screen when projected. The impact is tremendous as the film covers the entire screen. Besides, it also provides stereophonic sound, an important factor in Cinema Scope technology.
Pioneering CinemaScope: Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool
Bowled over the technology Guru Dutt employed the Cinema Scope technology for his film Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959).Guru Dutt imported CinemaScope lenses from 20th Century Fox, paying royalty for their use. However, despite this effort, Kaagaz Ke Phool flopped, and CinemaScope technology failed to gain traction in India..
Few are aware that before Guru Dutt‘s Kaagaz Ke Phool, filmmaker Khwaja Ahmad Abbas had used the same technology in the Indo- Soviet film Pardesi (Hindi-Urdu/ Russia) in 1957. Interestingly Pardesi was India’s first wide-screen film in color. The Censor Certificate of the film states ‘Colour, Scope’.
However, the failure of both the films – Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) and Pardesi did not encourage filmmakers to attempt Cinema Scope technology. The early ’70s marked television’s arrival in India, bringing Hindi films to the small screen. Sundays became film days, with audiences eagerly watching hit movies. Soon started a windfall of films with the introduction of Zee TV and other private channels and this gave cine buffs more opportunity to watch films on TV. Thus began the insecurity among filmmakers to pull the cinema buffs to theatre and the best option was to pull them to cinema halls by showing larger than life films on the widescreen through Cinema Scope technology. Bollywood adopted CinemaScope technology on a large scale in the ’80s, and since then, it has continued to thrive and evolve in the industry.
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