It occasionally seems to me that space underwent a terrible
deterioration in the 1950s. It eventually became impossible to compose
space in definition with the frame, because there was no way to control
or predict how, in projectio or broadcast, an image would be cropped.
If you study John Ford, one remarkable aspect is how crucially his
internal lines and angles (arguably the most geometrically obsessive
filmmaker ever!) are composed in terms of a definite rectangle. If you
alter that rectangle, terrible and unexpected catastrophes befall his
movies -- disastrous not only when Academy-ratio pictures are cropped,
but equally (or more so) when wider-ratio pictures are not cropped.
16mm print editions of Horse Soldiers and Donovan's Reef (as also of,
say, Sirk's Imitation of Life) didn't just crop off a bit of the sides,
they also added significant amounts of headroom and footroom, which
results, curiously, in a two hour movie sometimes behaving like a three
hour movie, proving the interchangeability of space and time and the
limited dimension thus far of this topic.