Hello!

Welcome to 2026 and a Brave New World …. this is the year in which Fritz Lang set  Metropolis, after all. We almost have flying cars and we definitely have big companies that grind up people. The dystopian developments we most fear are becoming more difficult to describe, let alone depict in a movie.

As we always take the easy way out, we therefore look back to the year 1955, to admire a pretty nifty YouTube promo for the big-format camera process Todd AO, posted by ‘marlbrouk’.

Presented in a ‘Smilebox’ format (here called ‘Ultra-Curve’), the 12-minute promo is a sampler of the 65mm film process, showing that it replicates the ‘enveloping’ effect of Cinerama without the cumbersome 3 screens and 3 projectors. It’s from an  Oklahoma! Blu-ray release; it may have been shown before some 1955 screenings of Oklahoma!  Could the neon-decked theater we see be the Egyptian on Hollywood Blvd?

Those Todd AO lenses were pretty incredible. Although the 30 fps version of Oklahoma! was a one-shot experiment, it sure looks good … and was incredible on a big screen.

(I have to say, I’m getting pretty fed up with forced ads on YouTube …)

Another link of note comes from Gary Teetzel — an informative video featurette about vintage Fin de siècle Flip Books, odd little publications from 125 years ago.

These are photographic movies printed on paper to flip with one’s thumbs … I remember spending afternoons as a teenager doing animated mini-cartoons in the margins of books, at least until my teacher caught me.

The theme of this discussion / show ‘n’ tell is finding bits of Georges Méliès movies in these flip books. Some fragments may be from films that are considered lost. ‘Re-animating’ the flip books without destroying them involved some clever cinematographic techniques. The speakers are International Scholars Robert Byrne and Thierry Lecointe; the host is Pamela Hutchinson, who so impressed us that we featured her smile instead of an image of a flip book. We’re bent that way.

The presentation was part of the 2021 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and begins with a Nosferatu– themed video promo. The speakers talk about the ‘Flip Book’ book that was generated from their research …  which I found here.

Scrolling down a bit further, we find about 30 fully recovered, restored and annotated flip book fragments, complete with mini-soundtracks. And since we like Pamela Hutchinson’s approach to film art, here is her  book on G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson