the.com/letterbox
Black bars that apologize for your TV's shape while worshipping the director's.
means A slot or box for receiving mail, or the black horizontal bars that preserve a film's original widescreen shape on a narrower screen.
from From 'letter' plus 'box' — straightforwardly, a box for letters, first used for mail slots in doors and pillar boxes. The cinematic sense arrived in the 20th century by visual analogy: the image on screen, squeezed between two black bars top and bottom, looked like it was peering out through a mail slot — so the term migrated from postal furniture to projection format.
- aspect ratio
- preserves original width instead of cropping it
- common myth
- bars are not burned into the actual film
- peak absurdity
- widescreen movies letterboxed inside already-widescreen TVs
- uk meaning
- also just means the slot mail drops through