Split screen (film)

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An example of split screen used in the sitcom That '70s Show.

In film, split screen is the visible division of the screen, traditionally in half, but also in several simultaneous images, rupturing the illusion that the screen's frame is a seamless view of reality, similar to that of the human eye. Until the arrival of digital technology in the early 1990s, this was accomplished by using an optical printer to combine two or more actions filmed separately by copying them onto the same negative, called "the composite."

This same technique was used in films like The Parent Trap (1961) in order to show having an actor talk to himself in a dual role. The actor was filmed as he stood at the left of the frame facing right. Then he was filmed standing at the right and facing the other way. The negative of the first action was placed into a printer and copied onto another negative, the composite, but this other negative was masked so that only the right part of the original picture is copied. Then the composite was rewound and the negative of the second action was copied onto the right side of each frame. On this second pass, the left side was masked to prevent double exposure. This technique is then carefully hidden by background lines, such as windows, doors, etc. to disguise the split.

The visionary French director, Abel Gance, used the term "Polyvision" to describe his three-camera, three-projector technique for both widening and dividing the screen in his 1927 silent epic, Napoléon.

A slew of studio-made films in the Sixties gave rise to the term split screen. Using optical printing, they include John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), Richard Fleischer's The Boston Strangler (1968), Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Woodstock (1972) the little-known horror film, Wicked, Wicked (1972), and More American Graffiti (1975). An influential arena for the great split screen movies of the 1960s were two world's fairs - the 1964 New York World's Fair, where Ray and Charles Eames had a 17-screen film they created for IBM's "Think" Pavilion (it included sections with race car driving) and the 6-division film To Be Alive, by Francis Thompson, which won the Academy Award that year for Best Short. John Frankenheimer made Grand Prix after his visit to the 1964 New York World's Fair. The success of these pavilions further influenced the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal, commonly referred to as Expo 67, whose many multi-screen pavilions inspired directors Norman Jewison and Richard Fleischer to create their ambitious split-screen films of 1968 after each of them stopped by Expo '67. Filmmaker Brian De Palma has incorporated split screens into many of his films, most notably in Sisters (1972) and they have since become synonymous with his filmmaking style.

It's also common to use this technique to portray both participants in a telephone conversation simultaneously, a long-standing convention which dates back to early silents, as in Lois Weber's triangular frames in her 1913 Suspense, and culminating in Pillow Talk, 1959 where Doris Day and Rock Hudson share a party line. So linked to this convention are the Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies that Down With Love, the only slightly tongue-in-cheek homage, used split screen in several phone calls, explicitly parodying this use. The BBC series Coupling made extensive use of split screen as one of several techniques that are unconventional for TV series, often to a humorous effect. One episode, 'Split', was even named after the use of the effect. Later, the Fox TV series 24 used split-screen to show the many tense phone conversations it entailed, as well as to suggest the ticking clock of simultaneously-unfolding actions. The director of the pilot, Stephen Hopkins, was greatly influenced by The Boston Strangler's use of multiple screens to create tension.

An unusual and revolutionary use of split screen as an extension to the cinematic vocabulary was invented by film director Roger Avary in The Rules of Attraction (2002) where two separate halves of a split screen are folded together into one seamless shot through the use of motion control. The much acclaimed shot was examined and detailed in Bravo Television's Anatomy of a Scene.

The arrival of digital video technology has made dividing the screen much easier to accomplish, and recent digital films and music videos have explored this possibility in depth. Sometimes the technique is used to show actions occurring simultaneously; Time Code 1999, by Mike Figgis, is a recent example, where the combination is of four realtime digital video cameras shown continuously for the duration of the film. The extensive use of split-screen as part of the narrative structure of a film, as in The Boston Strangler.

The split screen has also been simulated in video games. Most notably Indigo Prophecy where it is used to allow a player to keep track of multiple simultaneous elements relevant to the gameplay.