Riiven Slants
Ninety Feet a Minute
The look of cinema is the running time of a record side.
Cinema runs at twenty four frames a second, and directors defend that rate as the look of film itself. The number was never chosen for the eye. It was chosen to fit a record.
Silent film had no fixed speed. Projectionists set the pace to suit the house, the hour, and the crowd. Kevin Brownlow showed in Sight and Sound in 1980 that speeds varied by cinematographer, genre, country, and theatre. A comedy ran at one pace, a drama at another, and nobody agreed on a single number.
Late silent projection often ran fast. In 1927 Earl Sponable reported that New York theatres projected at about 105 feet per minute, and up to 120 feet per minute on Sundays. That works out to roughly twenty eight frames a second. The rate that came next sat well below it.
Then Western Electric needed picture and sound to stay locked together. Vitaphone played its audio from a sixteen inch disc turning at thirty three and a third revolutions per minute. One disc had to last as long as one reel. Western Electric fixed projection at 90 feet per minute, which is exactly 24 frames a second.
Sound did not speed film up. It froze a drifting variable, and in many houses it slowed the picture down. The Society of Motion Picture Engineers looked at the new sound systems in 1927 and found Vitaphone and Movietone both running at 24. The standard wrote down what the machines already did.
Peter Jackson released The Hobbit at 48 frames a second in 2012. The format did not become a routine theatrical standard, and Hollywood did not adopt it. Twenty four stays, defended now as the texture of cinema. It began as the playing time of a phonograph disc.
Watch
The tilt
Directors defend twenty four as the look of film. The number was never looking at anything. It was listening to a record.
Sources
- Earl I. Sponable, “Some Technical Aspects of the Movietone,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1927) (1927)
- Kevin Brownlow, “Silent Films: What Was the Right Speed?,” Sight and Sound (Summer 1980) (1980)
- Museum of the Moving Image, “Motion-picture projector, Western Electric Vitaphone System 35mm Universal Base Projector, ca. 1927”
- Ben Model, “Faster Than the Speed of Sound” (2019)
- The Hollywood Reporter, “Despite ‘The Hobbit,’ Hollywood Isn’t Adopting 48 Frames Per Second” (2013)
- P. M. Rainey, “Some Technical Aspects of the Vitaphone,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (August 1927), p. 313 (1927)
