Cinema Panoramique (French anamorphot brochure)

Jim Exley, a Bolex collector from the UK, has kindly sent us some scans of his French language Anamorphot brochure. It's from 1958 and is stamped for "Photo-Plage", a photographic shop and Bolex dealer in Nieuport, Belgium at the time.

The Bolex Anamorphot attachment was used to create widescreen movies by compressing a wider image onto the normal 4:3 aspect ratio of a film frame.

After the film was processed, it could be projected as a widescreen image by placing the Anamorphot attachment in front of the projector lens (with a special bracket.) The above picture, from the brochure, shows how a scene would appear when filmed and later projected with the Anamorphot. I created the image below to show how the Anamorphot "squeezes" the wide image onto the standard 4:3 frame.

Here are some more scans from the brochure of the Anamorphot and its mounting brackets for different cameras.:

...and a list of Bolex product codes for the 8mm and 16mm Anamorphot with mounting brackets for cameras and projectors: