One of the pleasures of running one’s eyes and hands across the pages of an atlas is of discovery, of unknown wonders, colorful landscapes, ocean ways, and celestial bodies. Cinema too has long been conceived as a kind of atlas, a cartographic guide to the world, and like the treasured maps found in the earliest atlases—for instance in the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)—films were meticulously produced in color from the very beginning. Indeed early atlases and early film were both technical feats of design and illustration, printing, and of color. Through these feats of ingenuity, they brought the world afar into chromatic visibility, inspiring  the imagination as well as a colonial gaze. One can see various climes reproduced in technical splendor across the immense range of color processes detailed here: the tinting and toning patterns illuminating the Antarctic in The Great White Silence (1924); the British Raj filmed in Kinemacolor; Sonia Delaunay’s experiments with the Keller-Dorian process in France; Native Americans filmed in Prizma Color (process #2), and Coney Island in Handschiegl in Pál Fejős’s luminous Lonesome (1928). One can go on, getting lost in countless examples, which is part of the wonder of the colors of the moving image and of this film atlas.

Film Atlas is a compendium of film in all of its different shapes and sizes. Although mainstream theatrical distribution has been limited in most part to a few select gauges like 16mm, 35mm and 70mm, this hasn't stopped creative inventors from pushing the boundaries of what's possible. As of February 2026, Film Atlas has published 150 essays – about one quarter of all essays planned for the site. What are the current record holders? For biggest film, the current winner is Vitalux, thousands of tiny images printed on film 127mm wide. For smallest format, Cine-System 3 takes the prize, just 3mm wide. For widest, the champion is Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents; this immersive format was photographed on 35mm film running sideways, with each frame measuring 22.6cm wide! And for tallest, IMAX can't be beaten; the largest-ever IMAX screen measured 35.7m tall. But as the website grows, will any of these record holders be toppled?

The USC HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive has a wide array of non-standard and oddball film formats from across the history of cinema. Of particular interest to me are formats with central perforations, or more precisely, perforations found between each frame, rather than along the film's edges. This perforation placement, which could be considered flawed in hindsight, was used since the beginning, and in many shapes and sizes. Most commonly associated with thousands of Pathe Baby 9.5mm films, these perforations can also be found on Eric Berndt’s Cine-System 3 from the 1960s, various 35mm Parnaland examples from France in the early 1900s and even the early Lee and Turner color process, as well as others. 

The perceived drawbacks of such perforations are often illustrated using the many damaged Pathe Baby prints that now contain center scratching through the image area. However this damage should really be credited to the poor design of the early Baby projector with its protruding claw for the pulldown, and lack of proper sprocket wheels for movement. The majority of formats utilizing perforations between frames did so with sprocket wheels for more consistent and stable forward movement, often coupled with a maltese cross for the pulldown, which avoided the projector simply pulling the film across the sharp teeth, should the film slip off the claw.