inerama was launched in New York in 1952 when television was thought to be a major threat to US film. There was fierce competition to win cinema audiences back and to find new ways of making the cinema experience special.

For a brief period until the mid-1960s, Cinerama’s new widescreen technology – a huge 146 degree circular screen image created by projecting simultaneously from three synchronised 35mm projectors – was highly profitable. Unfortunately its expensive production costs, almost akin to shooting three features, and cheaper alternatives such as CinemaScope and Todd-AO soon heralded the end to Cinerama film production.

However the vision of Cinerama as a widescreen experience was not completely dead. At the end of the 1960s the taller (but not wider) IMAX took up many of its original ideas and is still flourishing.

Bradford International Film Festival’s Widescreen Weekend, from April 27 to 30, celebrates the 60th anniversary of Cinerama.

Highlights will include the screening of rarely seen prints, projected in the only Cinerama theatre outside America – the National Media Museum’s Pictureville cinema.

Film director and historian Kevin Brownlow will be in Bradford on April 29 to talk about Cinerama and the early experiments in large format presentations. He gives the season a ringing endorsement: “The opportunity to see Cinerama is so rare, no cineaste can afford to miss it!”

Only ten three-strip original Cinerama films were produced, and five of these will feature in BIFF’s Widescreen Weekend alongside 70mm classics such as David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter, Michael Anderson’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and Ridley Scott’s Black Rain.

“Cinerama was one of the great romantic notions in cinema,” says Widescreen Weekend curator Bill Lawrence. “The great showman Lowell Thomas brought to the screen a new format that showed hungry American audiences what the 1950s world was like and they went in their thousands.

“While the system died out in the 1960s, by the end of that decade IMAX was underway and following a very similar path. Cinema’s great ability to show the world in all its glory remains at the forefront today and the showmanship of Cinerama lives on in 3D, IMAX, Bollywood and alternative content.”

Original three-Strip Cinerama Films Screened during Widescreen Weekend are: This is Cinerama - the first Cinerama film produced, screening 60 years after it was first premiered; Cinerama’s Russian Adventure; How the West Was Won; Cinerama’s South Seas Adventures; The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.