Focal Lengths of 1930s/40s Hollywood

[Alexander Nowak]

Recently, I’ve been watching the films of Yasujiro Ozu, who was famous for shooting exclusively (as far as I know) with a 50mm lens. It got me wondering which focal lengths were most common and/or most utilized during the 1930s and 40s in Hollywood. One of my favorite films is Casablanca, which looks a bit wider angle than a 50mm to my eye, though I’m by no means an expert. Any wisdom that can be shared would be greatly appreciated. I love details about cinema history and technique. Thanks!

[David Mullen ASC]

A lot of “Citizen Kane” was shot on 24mm Cooke but a 35mm was the more common wide-angle lens used. (35mm was also the widest prime that could be used on a 3-strip Technicolor camera, but a few times a wide-angle attachment was used to get wider, with mixed results.) 
40mm and 50mm were popular, sometimes a 75mm for close-ups.

[Dom Jaeger]

Up until the 30s, the widest focal length generally available for 35mm movies was 32mm. The more common focal lengths were 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, 75mm and 100mm. In the early 30s Zeiss broke that barrier with a 27mm Tessar, then in the mid 30s a number of companies released 24 and 25mm cinema lenses, the most popular being the Cooke 24mm Speed Panchro. So when Toland filmed Citizen Kane in 1940 it was a relatively new thing to have such a wide angle in movies. Even though its influence was phenomenal, for a number of years after Citizen Kane most films still stuck to longer lenses, only using something as wide as a 24mm for occasional establishing shots. 

In 1951 Angenieux released an 18.5mm which ushered in a period of more wide angle use, followed soon after by the 18mm Speed Panchro released in 1954. Around this time there was also the very wide bug-eye lens made for Cinerama which was the widest angle of view ever seen in movies at that time. The Series III 18mm Speed Panchro released in the early 60s was an improvement on the earlier version, using an aspheric element and finally providing filmmakers with a wide angle lens that had virtually no compromises compared to longer focal lengths.

In the late 60s, the French firm Kinoptik released their 9.8mm Tegea, expanding the view of cinema cameras even further, a lens famously used by Kubrick in films like A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.

See this post for more details about the history of wide angle lenses in cinema:

 

Edited August 23, 2023 by Dom Jaeger

[Alexander Nowak]

Thank you so much for the great info! I'm always fascinated to learn how things are done, whether it's now or 80 years ago. It's all a fascinating continuum.

[Jeff Bernstein]

Congratulations everyone on a colossally interesting thread, with massively accomplished replies, and Alexander Nowak for an unspeakably crucial question. My goodness. May the Technicians Who Know Keep Telling.

 

In fact, this is a thread to cut-and-paste and save forever. Now this is Cinematography.com!

 

Best wishes.

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Not to be annoying (way too late)—but may I add two cents in my way? I can comment here only in a general manner, because I’m no technician of the camera, but . . . Without an Audience Watching, what is the use of a camera lens? Scrooby is the audience who watches.

 

Point? Historically speaking, the development of the new lenses around 1940 or so—not only for deep focus (Toland and the period around Kane), but also for a sharper image which Hollywood apparently considered a “refinement” over the “soft” lighting photography of 1930s films (which Scrooby believes is still the best medium to shoot an actress)—is equivalent to the change in Human Thought that took place in the 1920s (which is the foundation of Oppenheimer).

 

Stay with me.

 

First : Is it a coincidence that the mind-shattering Revolution in Philosophic Thought (Husserl and Heidegger) appeared at the same precise moment (so to speak) as the appearance of quantum theory? In the same decade Thomas Mann reminded the world in The Magic Mountain (1924) that the “change” in Human Mindset came not in the 1920s but way back in 1914–18 (WWI), a disruption (to put it mildly) that paved the way for New Questioning and a New Way. Note how in the 1920s there was a Full-Spectrum Revolution in Thought. Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land : 1922. (And doesn't the character Oppenheimer remark on such names as Stravinsky at one point?)

 

We need another revolution like this : THIS VERY SECOND.

 

Okay. Here comes the point :

 

When WW2 breaks out, a new “hard clarity” to Hollywood lensing appears, in keeping with the “hard reality” (to put it so mildly the phrase is ludicrous) of the world Situation.

 

This allows for the game-changing Double Indemnity to look to our eyes as if it has arrived millennia after the early 1930s movies. And this is no exaggeration. Watch RKO movies from 1931 and 1932 or so then put on Double Indemnity, and such a transition is equivalent to putting down Paradise Lost (1667) and picking up The Waste Land (1922).

 

And the screen kisses in Double Indemnity are vertically designed. Goodbye, 1930s. Did the last colossal 1930s screen kiss appear in The Philadelphia Story (1940)? (A title mentioned in Double Indemnity!) By 1944 we're now in a skewed world forevermore.

 

At any rate, how could Hollywood return to the soft dreams of 1930s cinema, after WW2? It couldn’t, because it didn’t.

 

One aspect of the Oppenheimer phenomenon not yet mentioned by Scrooby : the world is watching a movie heavy with B&W and has no problem with it.

 

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

P.S. John Bailey celebrates film history with a fantastic Toland-type deep focus shot with what looks like unspeakably perfect lighting in As Good as It Gets, 1:30:52.

[Jeff Bernstein]

LIST OF EQUIPMENT USED BY GREGG TOLAND FOR CITIZEN KANE (1941)

 

According to an RKO document dated 4 June 1940, as reprinted in Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane.

 

Mitchell Camera

Bell & Howell Camera

24 MM Cooke

25 MM

35 MM

40 MM Astro

50 MM Astro 18890 F 1-8

50 MM Astro F 2-3

75 MM Astro

And then a long number of items.

 

Carringer : "List of the equipment Toland brought from Goldwyn Studios for shooting CK. Toland was the first major cinematographer to use the new blimpless Mitchell camera, the BNC. The 24-mm Cooke was the widest-angle lens in common use at the time."

 

 

[Jeff Bernstein]

More Carringer : “Several developments made a sharper, deeper, high-contrast image possible. Depth of field can be increased by shooting with a wide-angle lens and narrowing the aperture setting. Among the technical difficulties involved in achieving extreme depth of field are the great loss of light that occurs when the aperture is narrowed and the graininess of the fast film stocks used to compensate for this loss. In the mid 1930s, partly in response to the requirements of the new Technicolor cinematography, a new generation of arc lamps was introduced. They were silent, more controllable, and much more powerful that their predecessors. In 1938, Eastman Kodak introduced its new Super XX film stock, which was four times faster than Super X without any appreciable increase in grain. In 1939, researchers announced the principle of lens coating, which allowed light transmission to be improved by covering the lens surface with a microscopically thin layer of magnesium fluoride. (Scrooby : Didn’t David Mullen speak of a coating applied to the lens to create magic effects in Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012)?) Also in 1939, a new, exceptionally fine-grain stock for release prints was introduced, which virtually eliminated the problem of grain multiplication that appeared when the print passed through successive generations between camera and release.”

 

Before this, recalling Scrooby’s earlier post (can’t help it, sorry) :

 

Carringer : “The first set of advances involved the sharpness of the film image. In the 1930s, the typical studio style tended toward heavily diffused lighting, soft tonality, and a relatively shallow depth of field. . . . As the decade progressed, technical improvements in lighting and film stocks made possible a return to the sharper, crisper, still-photographic style characteristic of many silent films. But the soft look was still favored, and conservative studio cinematographers usually found it safer to observe established practices than to strike out in new directions.”

 

Carringer : “Finally, Toland contributed a number of technical innovations of his own. . . .”

[Jeff Bernstein]

In the appendix to Operating Cinematography (1997) by William E. Hines is a wonderful and somewhat tremendous list of technical developments in cinematography from 1889 to the present day. The list, closely printed in small print, comprises 14 pages.

[David Mullen ASC]

On 8/28/2023 at 11:57 PM, Jeff Bernstein said:

(Scrooby : Didn’t David Mullen speak of a coating applied to the lens to create magic effects in Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012)?)

 

What I was referring to is that occasionally Kaminski will smear a little Vaseline or something oily on the edge of the filter in front of the lens. I've done something similar in the past.  A more subtle version is John Seale using an oily fingerprint on some glass in front of the lens to soften a close-up, as seen in "The English Patient".

[Owen A. Davies]

On 8/23/2023 at 5:31 PM, Dom Jaeger said:

Up until the 30s, the widest focal length generally available for 35mm movies was 32mm. The more common focal lengths were 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, 75mm and 100mm. In the early 30s Zeiss broke that barrier with a 27mm Tessar, then in the mid 30s a number of companies released 24 and 25mm cinema lenses, the most popular being the Cooke 24mm Speed Panchro. So when Toland filmed Citizen Kane in 1940 it was a relatively new thing to have such a wide angle in movies. Even though its influence was phenomenal, for a number of years after Citizen Kane most films still stuck to longer lenses, only using something as wide as a 24mm for occasional establishing shots. 

In 1951 Angenieux released an 18.5mm which ushered in a period of more wide angle use, followed soon after by the 18mm Speed Panchro released in 1954. Around this time there was also the very wide bug-eye lens made for Cinerama which was the widest angle of view ever seen in movies at that time. The Series III 18mm Speed Panchro released in the early 60s was an improvement on the earlier version, using an aspheric element and finally providing filmmakers with a wide angle lens that had virtually no compromises compared to longer focal lengths.

In the late 60s, the French firm Kinoptik released their 9.8mm Tegea, expanding the view of cinema cameras even further, a lens famously used by Kubrick in films like A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.

See this post for more details about the history of wide angle lenses in cinema:

 

To my knowledge (and I may very well be wrong) there was both a 25mm Bausch and Lomb Baltar as well as an 18mm Taylor Hobson Cooke Speed Panchro that existed and was being used in the 1930s. 

[Simon Wyss]

18 mm wasn’t available before 1945. https://www.fdtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Cooke-Book-2013-FDTimes.pdf

[Jon O'Brien]

On 8/31/2023 at 10:59 AM, David Mullen ASC said:

What I was referring to is that occasionally Kaminski will smear a little Vaseline or something oily on the edge of the filter in front of the lens. I've done something similar in the past.  A more subtle version is John Seale using an oily fingerprint on some glass in front of the lens to soften a close-up, as seen in "The English Patient".

I met John Seale the other day. He was in Brisbane for a talk. I went up to him after the talk and spoke with him briefly, asking him how he shot 'Witness' and other questions. A very down to earth and likeable man. I shook his hand when it was time for him to leave. Wow.

[Dom Jaeger]

18 hours ago, Simon Wyss said:

18 mm wasn’t available before 1945. https://www.fdtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Cooke-Book-2013-FDTimes.pdf

Some of the dates in that article, as well as on Cooke’s website, are not correct. After a lot of research I dated the first 18mm Cooke Speed Panchro to 1954, a few years after Angenieux released their 18.5mm in 1951. 

[Simon Wyss]

Thank you, shouldn’t have imagined that TTH publish wrong information.

Bien que nos renseignements soient faux , nous ne les garantissons pas. Although our informations are false we do not guarantee them. Erik Satie

[Owen A. Davies]

13 hours ago, Dom Jaeger said:

Some of the dates in that article, as well as on Cooke’s website, are not correct. After a lot of research I dated the first 18mm Cooke Speed Panchro to 1954, a few years after Angenieux released their 18.5mm in 1951. 

What about the original Bausch & Lomb Baltar 25mm T/2.5? I had thought that that lens was floating around in the early 1930s

[Simon Wyss]

As much as I know the first 25 mm Baltar appeared in 1939. The yellow-dot version came in 1942, the purple-dot version from 1945 on. Super Baltar 1961