Light, manageable, economical: features and technological evolution of small gauge cinema

The history of small gauge cinema is first and foremost a history of the technology and innovations that made it possible to obtain film formats and technical equipment that were light, manageable, economical and safe, i.e. non-flammable. It was not until the beginning of the 1920s, after several attempts in the preceding decades, that the Pathé-Baby 9.5 mm format was actually the first one to achieve the fundamental prerequisites for a diffusion outside professional cinema. More or less contemporary is the other reduced format par excellence, the 16mm invented by Kodak, which started out as an amateur format and in the following decades will have a wide professional use. It was followed by the 8mm (1932) and Super8 (1965) formats for a diffusion that would finally be massive. Mirco Santi traces the history of formats dwelling on the most important junctures concerning the evolution of the technical characteristics and practices of reduced format cinema, from chromatism to sound, to projection methods.