Ruairi Kavanagh remembers the magic of a room in the house dedicated to cinema and Super-8.
Dead Format Month - How The West Was Won (1962)
Directed by: Henry Hathaway, John Ford, George Marshall, Richard Thorpe
Starring: James Stewart, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Carroll Baker, Lee J Cobb, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, Karl Malden, George Peppard, Eli Wallach, Walter Brennan, Raymond Massey, Agnes Moorehead, Thelma Ritter, Russ Tamblyn, Spencer Tracy, Harry Dean Stanton, Lee Van Cleef
An epic family drama which deals with the Civil War, the Gold Rush and the dawn of the railroad, all shot in Cinerama.
Dead Format Month - Wiiiiiiiidescreeeeen
In an age when we can enjoy watching DVDS, Blu-Rays and online films on a large screen TV and surround sound system in our living room (or home theater room if you're lucky), the thrill of a cinema visit isn't what it used to be. In the mid twentieth century, television sets were appearing in more and more homes, leading Hollywood to look for new ways to entice people back to the cinema. 3D was attempted unsuccessfully but what did work was the enlarging of the screen itself to give us what's now known collectively as "widescreen". Various widescreen formats competed for your dollar in the fifties and sixties. Here we take a look at the successful and not so successful variants.
Dead Format Month - 35mm
Photography enthusiast John Saltwell looks back fondly on a format which, after over a century in existence, is now becoming little more than a nostalgic memory.