The large-format, high-resolution VistaVision process only lasted from ’54 to ’61, but it certainly made films look extra-sharp and luscious during that brief heyday — The Ten Commandments, Richard III, Strategic Air Command, To Catch a Thief, The Searchers, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Loving You, Gunfight At The O.K. Coral, North by Northwest, One-Eyed Jacks, etc.
VistaVision generally made color features look like eye-popping, high-calorie desserts, and the black-and-white ones — The Desperate Hours, Fear Strikes Out, The Joker is Wild, Desire Under The Elms, The Tin Star — looked extra smooth and needle-sharp with wonderful deep blacks. Present-tense Bluray and 4K renderings of these films are always extra-pronounced…good enough to eat.
So why don’t the new VistaVision films — Paul Thomas Anderson One Battle After Another and Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist — look as good as the oldies? To me the newbies look okay but that’s all. The 35mm process via the Beaumont VistaVision camera or “Beaucam”, which Anderson and Corbet used, is roughly the same calibre as the VV cameras used in the ’50s, but neither OBAA or The Brutalist deliver that special VistaVision schwing. There isn’t a single moment in Anderson’s gritty-ass film that delivers any kind of super-pleasurable eye bath.
I’m presuming that Anderson wasn’t interested in giving his films a ’50s visual sheen and may have been looking to deliver that hand-held, you-are-there verite quality that Gillo Pontecorvo used for The Battle of Algiers, and that’s fine. But why shoot the fucking thing in VistaVision then? Because OBAA just looks like a normal, no-big-deal 35mm movie. It certainly doesn’t make your eyes go boiiiinng!
