Split screen (video production)
[1][2][3] 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 3-division film To Be Alive, by Francis Thompson, which won the Academy Award that year for Best Short.
The success of these pavilions further influenced the 1967 Universal exhibition in Montreal, commonly referred to as Expo 67, where multi-screen highlights included In the Labyrinth, hailed by Time magazine as a "stunning visual display," their review concluding: "such visual delights as Labyrinth ... suggest that cinema—the most typical of 20th century arts—has just begun to explore its boundaries and possibilities," as well as A Place to Stand, which displayed Christopher Chapman's pioneering "multi-dynamic image technique" of shifting multiple images.
[4] It is also common to use this technique to simultaneously portray both participants in a telephone conversation, 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, 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 acclaimed Fox TV series 24 used split-screen extensively to depict the many simultaneous events, enhancing the show's real-time element as well as connecting its multiple storylines.
Sometimes the technique is used to show actions occurring simultaneously; Timecode (2000), by Mike Figgis, is a recent example where the combination is of four real time digital video cameras shown continuously for the duration of the film.
[6] This technique has been used to portray twins in such films as Wonder Man (1945), The Dark Mirror (1946), The Parent Trap (both the 1961 original and the 1998 remake), and Adaptation (2002).
In Indiscreet (1958), the technique was famously used to bypass the censors and allow Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to be in bed together, and even to appear to pat her on the bottom.
They include John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), Richard Fleischer's The Boston Strangler (1968), and Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).
The film was designed to enlist the audience as perceptual editors, as they can choose to watch either character act and react in real time.
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.
The "Interactive Olaf" bonus feature from the DVD release of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events shows Jim Carrey's makeup tests from the movie in a four-way split-screen.
The split screen has also been simulated in video games, most notably Fahrenheit where it is used to allow a player to keep track of multiple simultaneous elements relevant to the gameplay.
In Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" video a number of freeze frames are shown in split screen.
Split screens showcasing individual character reactions are a common device of Japanese anime, where they imitate the panel layouts of manga.
