Content area
Full Text
If the history of film is a history of creative expression and experimentation, it is also a history of technical innovations, standards, and practices. Of these, the width, or gauge, of film is one of the most critical, if often neglected. While film gauges were—by and large, and with important exceptions—standardized very early in an effort to make film an interoperable, international technology, producers and equipment manufacturers continued to experiment with film gauge, making films wider and narrower to achieve various exhibition-related objectives. Over time, film gauges became associated with modes of display, sites of exhibition, and specific uses of the medium. Unlike other film histories, the history of film gauges is not a story of growth from small to large, low to high, or local to global. Instead, film gauge confounds these narratives, offering us a history of dead and loose ends.
What follows is a series of lilliputian lamentations, tiny tributes, half-pint histories, elfin elegies, mini manifestoes, and petit poems on the history of film gauges, starting with the widest gauge (125 mm) and ending with the smallest (3 mm). It was produced in the Surrealist spirit of an Exquisite Corpse: our team met once on Zoom to establish and discuss the rules that would guide our respective entries, which we did not share with each other until the entire piece was drafted in our separate corners. We assigned each participant a set of gauges on a 1-2-3-4 basis, rotating writers as we went from the widest to the narrowest, with each entry written to the precise...