Weegee, [Widescreen image of sailboat Christian Raditch in Louis de Rochemont’s film Windjammer], ca. 1958 (7584.1993)
This image is of a movie, Windjammer. The movie was filmed in Cinemiracle, a wide-format film type. Cinemiracle was in direct competition with the previously developed Cinerama. It used three cameras to capture a 2.59:1 image, including two mirrors to give the left and right cameras the same optical center as the middle camera. This had the effect of making the joins between the projected images much less obvious than when films were shot with Cinerama. Unfortunately, Windjammer was the only movie ever filmed on Cinemiracle, as it was shortly bought out by Cinerama and effectively shelved ad infinitum. The film premiered on the East Coast at the Roxy Theater, 153 West 50th Street, in New York. There’s a good chance this theater is where the image was taken, given how few theaters were equipped with the special twenty-four foot curved screen necessary to project the film. Windjammer is a documentary tracking the 17,500 nautical mile journey of a Norwegian training ship, the Christian Radich. The film follows the ship and crew, made up mostly of young sailors-in-training, from Oslo across the Atlantic to New York and back to Norway. Weegee shot the New York sequences of the film.
—Kathy Akey, ICP-Bard 2014
Fans in a Flashbulb 