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Last night the folks at Northwest Chicago Film Society proudly asserted that they were projecting Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park in its correct aspect ratio of 1.37:1 for the first time in Chicago. I hadn’t seen the film since it played at the Landmark Century in 2008, where it was projected in the less boxy—and far more common—ratio of 1.85:1. My memories of the film weren’t all that vivid, and I didn’t recall responding strongly to it one way or the other. Revisiting Paranoid as an experiment in Academy ratio framing turned it into a new experience, and a pretty satisfying one at that. Van Sant’s bisected compositions (like the early, Rothko-esque shots of the young hero walking across a field toward the Pacific Ocean, the bottom half of the screen all green-brown grass and the upper half all blue-gray water and sky) felt especially impactful in the more squarish frame, as did the close-up shots, which presented entire faces with barely any negative space around them.
