Franscope(1956–1971)

Franscope was the leading French anamorphic widescreen company of the 1950s and 1960s, with over 125 French films shot using its anamorphic lenses over a 15-year period. Jean-Placide Mauclaire’s company was the first in France to respond to 20th Century-Fox’s CinemaScope monopoly, offering a more economical and flexible alternative in 1953 with its Cinépanoramic process. Renamed Franscope in March 1956, the brand took market leadership in 1962, surpassing DyaliScope in domestic production, and remained dominant until 1970. Franscope answered complaints from producers and distributors who wanted to limit costs – its lenses were cheaper than CinemaScope’s – and to avoid modifying projectors and cinemas, thus escaping the CinemaScope monopoly. This success owed much to the trust French professionals placed in domestic trademarks (from 1957, domestic production no longer relied on American CinemaScope), but also to the marketing Mauclaire’s company carried out among cinematographers and directors through its corporate publication Le Film français. Indeed, Jean Dicop, an assistant cameraman, was inspired to develop the ingenious, higher-quality Franscope Suprématic system by the constraints operators faced when filming in anamorphic scope: reduced depth of field, the need for increased lighting, variation in the squeeze factor between the center of the frame and its edges, and parasitic reflections or flares. Following the DyaliScope monobloc lens, the Franscope “semi-block” system – a lens attachment – won over a growing number of operators.

In the 1950s, film production traditionally focused on the outdoors and the sensational, with historical adventure films shot in Eastmancolor (e.g., Bernard Borderie’s Tahiti ou la joie de vivre, 1956), or musical films (André Hunebelle’s Casino de Paris, 1957). From 1960 onwards, young auteurs began using Franscope – in particular the Zoom-Suprématic lens, which eliminated the need to change primary lenses – for their films: Lola (1960) by Jacques Demy, Une femme est une femme (1960) by Jean-Luc Godard, and Jules et Jim (1961) by François Truffaut. This opened French anamorphic scope production to low-budget productions, often shot in B/W: intimate dramas (Agnès Varda’s Les Créatures, 1965), psychological films (Luis Buñuel’s Journal d'une femme de chambre, 1963, or Godard’s Le Mépris, 1963), and popular crime films such as René Clément’s Les Félins (1963) and Compartiment tueurs (1964), directed by Costa-Gavras.

During the 1960s, films shot in Franscope achieved great public success: adventure films (100,000 dollars au soleil, Henri Verneuil, 1963), historical adventure films (Les Trois Mousquetaires, Bernard Borderie, 1961), espionage films (Banco à Bangkok pour O.S.S. 117, André Hunebelle, 1963), and comedies (Le Cerveau, Gérard Oury, 1968), notably those starring Louis de Funès. Franscope came to mark the golden age of French anamorphic scope filmmaking.

Although the last Franscope release came in 1970 and the company ceased operations the following year, the system was revived in the 1990s in France by another operator, Thierry Tronchet, and adapted to 16mm. This 16mm anamorphic “Tronchet scope” had a projected ratio of 2.74:1.

While modern anamorphic cameras are designed along the lines of the DyaliScope monobloc, there has been a recent trend among filmmakers and enthusiasts to reappropriate the retro aesthetics of 1950s and 1960s anamorphic images, reusing old anamorphic lenses (including Franscope) and adapting them to their digital cameras (particularly those with large sensors and 4:3 aspect ratios). (New Life Cine, 2021; True Lens Services, 2026).