Widescreen Weekend at The National Science and Media Museum
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
Widescreen Weekend is back, with a lineup of films including Indiana Jones, Alfred Hitchcock and a selection of widescreen romances, ready to celebrate only the biggest and boldest in cinema.
Bradford’s National Science and Media Museum’s five-day film festival highlights large-screen cinema formats, from 70mm to Cinerama, showing off the on-site Pictureville Cinema’s unique capabilities – all while inviting audiences and special guests to indulge in some of the greatest movies of all time, past and present.
As always, there are several themed strands running through the programme. Last year’s fest celebrated the 70th Anniversary of CinemaScope, so for 2024 organisers have decided it only right to explore the legacy of VistaVision, Paramount’s rival large-format system. There is also a focus on Italian widescreen movies, a section dedicated to exploring the history of romance on screen, plus a variety of special screenings and events.
The VistaVision heyday lasted just seven years, and involved turning filmstock on its side in order to allow more room for the image and provide a higher quality. Widescreen Weekend have booked a selection of Hitchcock favourites, including North By Northwest (Thu 26 Sept) and Vertigo (Sat 28 Sept), alongside classic Hollywood genre pieces such as Audrey Hepburn in musical Funny Face (Fri 27 Sept) and John Ford’s brutal western, The Searchers (Mon 30 Sept) to celebrate this short lived, yet impactful format.
The Widescreen All’Italiana section eschews the widescreen spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and company in favour of highlighting work from other genres. Selected by guest programmer Dr Pasquale Iannone, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh, audiences can look forward to Vittorio De Sica’s Oscar-winning Ieri, Oggi, Domani (Fri 27 Sept), alongside Federico Fellini’s classic La Dolce Vita and 2013’s offbeat mafia flick Sicilian Ghost Story (both Sat 28 Sept).
Selecting a programme of films to represent The History of Romance seems an impossible task, but the Widescreen Weekend lineup does a sterling job.
Selecting a programme of films to represent The History of Romance seems an impossible task, but the Widescreen Weekend lineup does a sterling job of balancing tender classics such as The Apartment (Fri 27 Sept), with grand epics Cleopatra and Doctor Zhivago (both Sun 29 Sept) – all while finding room for edgier contemporary titles including a 70mm showing of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (Sat 28 Sept) and Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy (Fri 27 Sept).
Away from the main strands, there’s a 70mm showing of Amadeus (Fri 27 Sept), plus a mammoth Indiana Jones All-Nighter (Sat 28 Sept) featuring seven hours of rolling boulders, vicious snake pits, and gleaming treasures. The National Science and Media Museum is also home to the world’s only public Cinerama screen, meaning screenings of Cinerama format titles How the West Was Won (Sat 28 Sept) and Seven Wonders of the World (Thu 26 Sept) are rare treats indeed.
