Ben-Hur (1959 Film) - Production - Cinematography

Cinematography

Robert Surtees, who had filmed many of the most successful epics of the 1950s and who had worked with Sam Zimbalist on Quo Vadis in 1951, was hired as cinematographer for the film. Early on in the film's production, Zimbalist and other MGM executives made the decision to film the picture in a widescreen format. Wyler strongly disliked the widescreen format, commenting that "Nothing is out of the picture, and you can't fill it. You either have a lot of empty space, or you have two people talking and a flock of others surrounding them who have nothing to do with the scene. Your eye just wanders out of curiosity." The cameras were also quite large, heavy, and difficult and time-consuming to move. To overcome these difficulties, Surtees and Wyler collaborated on using the widescreen lenses, film stocks, and projection technologies to create highly detailed images for the film. For establishing shots, they planned to show vast lines of marching Roman troops and sailing ships, immense architectural structures lined with thousands of extras, expansive landscapes, and action which moved across the screen. Wyler was best known for composition in depth, a visual technique in which people, props, and architecture are not merely composed horizontally but in depth of field as well. He also had a strong preference for long takes, during which his actors could move within this highly detailed space. But widescreen cinematic technology limited depth of field. Surtees and Wyler worked to overcome this by creating scenes in which one half of the screen is filled with a foreground object while the other half is filled with a background area, and then rack-focusing between the two as the action shifts from foreground to background. Notable instances of this occur when the injured Messala waits for Judah Ben-Hur to appear in the racecourse surgery, when Judah Ben-Hur hides behind a rock to avoid being seen by his mother and sister in the Valley of the Lepers, and during the Sermon on the Mount.

The movie was filmed in a process known as "MGM Camera 65". 1957's Raintree County and Ben-Hur were the first MGM films to use the process. The MGM Camera 65 used special 65mm Eastmancolor film stock with a 2.76:1 aspect ratio. 70mm anamorphic camera lenses developed by the Mitchell Camera Company were manufactured to specifications submitted by MGM. These lenses squeezed the image down 1.25 times to fit on the image area of the film stock. The 65mm images were then printed on 70mm film stock. The extra 5mm of space on the film stock allowed the studio to use the new six-track stereo sound, which audiences rarely heard at the time.

To make a 35mm print (the type of film stock most smaller theaters could project), a 35mm print with black borders along the top and bottom of each frame was used. When projected, the 2.76:1 aspect ratio was retained. Because the film could be adapted to the requirements of individual theaters, movie houses did not need to install special, expensive 70mm projection equipment. This allowed more theaters to show the film. Six of the 70mm lenses, each worth $100,000, were shipped to Rome for use by the production.