James Layton, manager of MoMA’s Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center, and David Pierce, assistant chief and chief operations officer of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus, present a lively illustrated lecture about Hollywood’s first widescreen boom in the late 1920s—20 years before CinemaScope successfully transformed the movies. The studios bet on a plethora of technologies, with trade names like Magnascope, Fox Grandeur, Natural Vision, and Realife, that all competed to become the new industry standard. It was an era of grand showmanship, spectacle, and innovation that ultimately peaked too soon; audiences weren’t ready for such disruption, despite the huge promise. This largely overlooked period in film history is brought vividly back to life through a selection of rare archival imagery, film rediscoveries, and recreations of past exhibition practices. Program approx. 90 min.