VistaVision is a widescreen movie format from the 1950s that's enjoying a comeback. Some of today's top filmmakers hope the old tech gets new audiences into theaters. In fact, two films getting awards buzz — One Battle After Another and Bugonia — were shot with restored VistaVision cameras, and Hollywood has more films using the technology coming.
Paramount Pictures introduced cinemagoers to VistaVision in 1954 with White Christmas. A promo that ran before the film screened announced VistaVision was "the ultimate in film presentation that will thrill all your senses, with its unbelievable clarity, sharpness, brilliance."
"It created a widescreen image that would look amazing when it was projected," says Charlotte Barker, director of film restoration and preservation at Paramount Pictures. Her office is filled with VistaVision memorabilia and a vintage "elephant ears" VistaVision camera. She's even writing a book about VistaVision.
A widescreen competition
According to Barker, VistaVision was part of the widescreen craze of the 1950s. That movement started with Cinerama — which used three synchronized cameras and three projectors to run onto three huge, curved screens.
Then 20th Century Fox came out with another panoramic format called CinemaScope — which needed just one projector and one screen, shot from cameras with a single lens. Barker says CinemaScope "would squeeze an image onto regular 35-millimeter film, but by doing that, that added a lot of film grain. That's what Paramount didn't like about that."
Barker says VistaVision was Paramount's answer to CinemaScope. It also uses 35-millimeter film, but instead of running through the camera vertically, it feeds through horizontally, like a still camera. The result is an image twice the size.
"There's no grain and the image clarity is beautiful," says Barker. "It showed the full view of your eye, like what your vision sees in your peripherals. That was the scope of VistaVision."
As early as the 1920s, filmmakers experimented with other formats, and a man named Edwin C. Clark filed a patent for a widescreen horizontal movie system. Paramount held on to the idea, and eventually developed it into VistaVision in the 1950s, led by the studio's sound director and chief engineer Loren Ryder and John R. Bishop. Their technical achievements earned them Academy Awards.
Filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille used VistaVision for the 1956 remake of his epic The Ten Commandments, and Alfred Hitchcock used VistaVision cameras to shoot many of his iconic films, including North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief and Vertigo.
Barker says Paramount and its directors hoped the format would lure people to movie theaters, at a time when television was becoming popular.
"This was absolutely a ploy to try to get people back in," she says, "to show them something that they couldn't get from their own couch at home."
But Barker says VistaVision soon fell out of fashion once another technology, Panavision, created better wide-angle lenses. In addition, union projectionists wanted to be paid more for screening films on special VistaVision projectors. Paramount released its last VistaVision film, One-Eyed Jacks, in 1961.
"After that, they just couldn't justify spending the extra money, especially for the amount of film that had to be used in the camera," she says. "Think about it: it was twice the amount of film cost."
One with the force
VistaVision found a new hope in the 1970s, when George Lucas' team at Industrial Light & Magic used it to shoot the special effects of Star Wars.
"George wanted a realistic representation of space travel," says visual effects supervisor John Dykstra, who led the team in winning the 1978 Academy Award for best visual effects for Star Wars.
Dykstra says they developed their own cameras with the horizontal format.
"We built more than one," he recalls, "but we [also] did modifications on existing VistaVision cameras. They were basic legacy devices. They were big, clunky things."
Dykstra says the cameras allowed them to capture the motion of miniature props better than the old stop-motion animation.
"George, bless him, was trying something different," recalls Dennis Muren, who was also on the team. He stayed on with Lucasfilm as a visual effects supervisor for 40 years.
"We built equipment to do all the maneuvering of the spaceships in this better format, this bigger film aspect ratio, more consistent with the live action photography, so they look real," he says. "So the shots look like you're out in space, flying around."
A Hollywood comeback
Now, in this age of streaming, live-action filmmakers have revived VistaVision, once again hoping audiences watch in cinemas.
Most of the period drama The Brutalist was shot in VistaVision by Lol Crawley, earning him the 2025 Oscar for best cinematography.
"The VistaVision camera enabled us to shoot these incredible high-resolution images and avoid this sort of distortion of a wider angle lens," says Crawley, who first came upon the format as a camera technician, responsible for loading VistaVision cameras for the Star Wars film The Phantom Menace.
The architecture, marble quarries and landscapes Crawley shot in Hungary for The Brutalist were gorgeous; but he says the vintage Beaumont VistaVision camera he used was as finicky as a classic car.
"I will just roll with the punches with these cameras because they're just beautiful pieces of machinery," he says. "And you have to forgive them their failings."
That's because VistaVision cameras are divas: larger-than-life and very noisy.
"I can't think of anything more off-putting than trying to give this very nuanced, sensitive, quiet performance with this camera rattling away at you," he says. "Sometimes we just had to put up with it. Other times we would do what we could to baffle the noise from the camera."
From his home in Los Angeles, actor Giovanni Ribisi demonstrates his refurbished VistaVision camera, which he bought 12 years ago at a shop in New York. "It was this amazing camera. And they were just kind of trying to get rid of it," he says. Ribisi pieced it together with various lenses, a viewfinder and other parts. "This is like Frankenstein," he says, adding that getting together the pieces "was like a back-alley drug deal, where I went in with a bag of cash and we traded."
Ribisi says there's something very emotional about watching footage from VistaVision cameras. "It has this sort of analog feel to it that there's just nothing else like it," he says. "If you want to talk about nostalgia, this is one of the things that kind of breaks my heart, because people don't really know how to build these things anymore."
Ribisi lent his cherished camera to Paul Thomas Anderson to shoot the dark comedy thriller One Battle After Another. The film's director of photography, Michael Bauman, says they ended up with three cameras, which were very loud.
"It's kinda like starting up a lawn mower," says Bauman, imitating the sound. "All of a sudden, the camera would go wooomp, and just stop. All right, we got a jam – we gotta figure it out. Sometimes film would come flying out because it was jammed up; sometimes the magazine that holds the film would just be dead."
Bauman says throughout the shoot, he was constantly tweaking the bespoke cameras.
"You're trying to resurrect a great format back from the dead and it can be frustrating at times," he says. "But the visual value of what we were getting was well worth the pain and misery at the time."
You can see the payoff in the dramatic climax of One Battle After Another. Bauman and his crew strapped a VistaVision camera to the front bumper of a car for a chase through a rolling desert landscape.
"So we could get the camera just a few inches off the surface of the road, which provides that super dynamic image of the wide lens, of going over the hills, what we called the river of hills," says Bauman. "It's an incredibly powerful sequence."
Like Hitchcock, today's filmmakers cover the cameras with soundproofing cases to muzzle the noise. That was especially useful for scenes with lots of close-up dialogue in the film Bugonia.
Though much of the movie is set in a cramped basement, filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos says he wanted the wide-angle look.
"I felt the juxtaposition of filming close-ups of faces in a very limited space with that kind of format made them iconic," he told NPR. "It's almost like photography portraiture."
Lanthimos first experimented with VistaVision in 2021 for a scene in his film Poor Things. And for Bugonia he again worked with cinematographer Robbie Ryan.
"I got a little bit traumatized when the whole shoot was going on a daily basis. But, I loved it," says Ryan. "It's a massive camera. Because the magazines are horizontal, you can almost put your cup of tea on it. It was great."
Ryan says they were able to work out some of the kinks.
"It's called VistaVision, so you think you're going to get all this landscape photography, but the landscape in Bugonia is the face," he says. "Looking at the iconic bald Emma Stone with antihistamine cream all over helped make that even more super real. And it just zings off the screen, the results are so gorgeous."
Hollywood's new love affair with VistaVision isn't ending with One Battle After Another and Bugonia. A number of high-profile projects are using the format, including Wuthering Heights, Greta Gerwig's Narnia and a new Tom Cruise movie by Alejandro González Iñárritu.
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