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NEW YORK TIMES July 7, 2012

Yes, Norma Desmond, the Pictures Are Getting Small AgainBy RANDALL STROSS

GO back far enough in the history of the Big Screen, back to the 1890s, and youll find noscreen at all.

The earliest motion-picture viewing was a solitary experience. One looked through apeephole at the top of a Kinetoscope, a waist-high cabinet in which a light illuminatedthe frames of a continuous film loop. A magnifying lens was attached to the peephole,

but the images remained tiny. That means the first cinematographers didnt have muchto work with.

When projection arrived, movie images could be made life-size in a theater, then largerthan life, on a big screen accompanied by big sound. Taking in a movie became not just

an immersive experience, but also a social one, with members of the audience sitting inthe dark together, laughing, crying and shrieking.

Today, weve reached the acme of technical sophistication and have come nearly fullcircle. Movie watching is, again, a solitary experience, involving small images on a laptop,a tablet and, tinier still, a cellphone. The convenience is wonderful, of course, but itcomes at a price: the loss of the immersive cinematic experience.

Americans will pay to watch 3.4 billion movies online this year, IHS Screen Digestestimates. Thats much more than double the number for 2010.

Its impossible to say exactly how many of those movies will be viewed on which portable

devices. A spokesman for Netflix, the leader in streaming older movie titles, declined toshare details about streaming device destinations.

We do know that the newest movie titles, including the most visually spectacular, areavailable through Apple or Google for inexpensive rental on the small screen. (Applemade movie rentals available for phones starting in 2008, and Netflixintroduced asmartphone appin 2010). Cellphone owners can rent Hugo, the 2012 Academy Award

winner for cinematography, for $3.99 and watch it on a screen whose size is not muchlarger than the image seen through the Kinetoscopes peephole.

When an online movie is viewed at home on a giant flat screen and heard through anexpensive sound system, the sensory experience surely exceeds what might be had at a

rundown multiplex on a bad day. But movies viewed on mobile devices arent going togive the brains sensorium much stimulation.

Its a sensual experience when you go to a theater, if theres sharp projection and six-track sound, saysJohn Belton, a professor of English and film at Rutgers University.That is a very different experience than watching on aniPad or on other portabledevices.

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Professor Belton points out that the first projected images in theaters were not all thatlarge. In a movie palace that might hold 5,000 people, an early screen might have beenonly 15 feet wide. But the images became larger around the time that sound arrived inthe 1930s.

Then, in the 1950s, as Hollywood found itself competing against television, it used

special lenses to create movies for screens of expanded width. Marilyn Monroes body, inlanguorous repose, would stretch across screens as wide as 64 feet. This was anintentional shift, Professor Belton says, to an image that overwhelms the spectator,part of Hollywoods campaign to show the limitations of television. Later, Hollywoodreversed course and began selling to television, though that meant cropping its wide-screen pictures so they would fit on a small screen.

The most glorious attempt to fully engage the theater spectators senses was Cinerama,introduced in 1952. Filmed with three cameras outfitted with wide-angle lenses, it usedthree wide screens, put together in a sumptuous near-semicircle of 146 degrees.

This gives you a first-person experience, says Thomas Hauerslev, editor of the Web

siteIn70mm. You see what youd see if you were sitting where the camera is. He saysIMAX is not a first-person experience its just big.

Each frame in Cinerama is 50 percent taller than a regular frame, providing more detail.This makes the cinematic illusion extremely realistic, Mr. Hauerslev says.

Cinerama was costly both to film and to exhibit, and its commercial life was short. It wasused only for travelogues, except in 1962, when the only two story-centered features werereleased: How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.The Cinerama name was transferred to a smaller format, and then that format, too, wasabandoned.

Cinerama was the high-water mark in sensory immersion. Yesterdays Kinetoscopes andtodays smartphone screens, the low-water marks.

If you look at the great Hollywood classics in the 1930s and 1940s, youll see many widemaster shots and sparing use of close-ups, says John Bailey, a cinematographer withmore than 60 feature credits who serves on the executive board of theAmerican Societyof Cinematographers. But with the advent of TV and now also with smaller screens,

were seeing more close-ups.

The problem, he says, is that if you use close-ups immoderately, then when you need tomake a more dramatic point, you have no other option but to use extreme close-ups.

The best camera, the old saying goes, is the one you have with you, and a similarthought is apparently held by increasing numbers of movie viewers, happy with thescreen they always have with them. And movie producers, just as they have in the past,

will probably keep adapting, changing movies themselves so that they look better on atiny screen.

You can say its watching a movie, says Professor Belton of viewing on mobile devices.But its not cinema.

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