The brand that’s often associated with the sort of high-quality pictures that people go to the movies for is IMAX. The name pops up in the promotional materials for “One Battle After Another,” the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson. Far less common is the inclusion of another filmmaking technology, VistaVision.
Although it will also be shown on IMAX screens and in several other formats, “One Battle After Another” is the latest film to be shot mainly in VistaVision, which uses larger film negatives for sharper quality. It follows use of the format in “The Brutalist,” the nearly four-hour period drama that earned its cinematographer, Lol Crawley, an Oscar.
“One Battle After Another” will also be projected in VistaVision in only four theaters around the world — in Boston, London, New York and Los Angeles — because very few are equipped to do so. (“The Brutalist” was shot in VistaVision but not projected in it.) Still, more VistaVision releases from major directors, including Yorgos Lanthimos, Greta Gerwig and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, are on the way, which may lead moviegoers to become acquainted with a technology that hadn’t been this popular since before Anderson was born. Here’s a breakdown of its long journey.
What is VistaVision?
VistaVision, created by Paramount Pictures in 1954, runs film stock through cameras horizontally, like photo and IMAX cameras, instead of vertically. The change results in a higher-resolution image and enhanced quality.
The format was used in dozens of films in the ’50s, including Cecil B. DeMille’s epic “The Ten Commandments” and the John Wayne western “The Searchers.” Alfred Hitchcock was one of the VistaVision era’s most prolific directors, using it to shoot five films, including “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest.”
Why was it invented?
By the 1950s, studio executives were fretting about an ascendant new technology called television. The number of households with a set increased from fewer than 6,000 in 1941 to nearly 10 million by 1950, while the weekly admissions for movies tumbled by 20 million from 1946 to 1950. Studios tried to home in on what movie screens could offer that a living room couldn’t.
Their answer at first was to go larger: Cinerama, introduced in the early 1950s, was so wide that it needed three projectors running at the same time to screen a film, and 20th Century Fox’s CinemaScope, arriving in 1953, offered a more manageable width that was still greater than the standard display. VistaVision was the narrowest of the three, and its advantages, according to a Times article, included “the fact that it can be projected on standard-size or outsize screens without a notable loss of pictorial quality.”
The high fidelity of VistaVision seemed to be apparent when Paramount released the first VistaVision feature, “White Christmas,” in 1954.
“The colors on the big screen are rich and luminous,” the Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote in his review, “the images are clear and sharp, and rapid movements are got without blurring — or very little — such as sometimes is seen on other large screens.”
But the VistaVision cameras were cumbersome, noisy and ran through film faster. Soon film stock that could rival VistaVision’s quality was available, and the format’s time as Paramount’s main filmmaking tool ended after just seven years with the 1961 western “One-Eyed Jacks.”
Its use for special effects saved it from complete obsolescence. The original “Star Wars” used VistaVision because the larger image area could handle combined visual effects without a significant loss in quality. The format has since stuck around as a supporting player, used to shoot some scenes as recently as 2023 in the dark comedy “Poor Things.”
Who is using it and why?
Special effects weren’t quite the driving reason for its return to prominence in “The Brutalist.” For one, Crawley, the cinematographer, and the director Brady Corbet thought it was fitting to use technology from the 1950s for a film set in that period. The movie also focuses on architecture, and VistaVision was part of an effort to capture design details accurately without the distortion of wide lenses.
For “One Battle After Another,” the cinematographer Michael Bauman said in a phone interview that Anderson picked VistaVision in search of a raw look that was partly inspired by the 1971 thriller “The French Connection.” Bauman noted the camera still had drawbacks — “It’s like having a lawn mower on set,” he said of its noisiness — but still lauded its film quality.
As for why VistaVision was being revived now, Bauman alluded to the challenges more than 70 years ago, when the core argument was that a TV set couldn’t give you the experience this format could deliver in a theater. In 2025, neither can streaming.
“In a world where everyone’s all about streaming, this is like, OK, here’s a reason to go back to the cinema,” Bauman said, “because this is an experience you’re just not going to get on your amazing 52-inch TV.”
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