Hollywood’s anamorphic lens concept comes to numismatics with a striking new 10th anniversary ten ounce silver coin from Le Grand Mint

Our story starts, weirdly enough, on the Western Front during the First World War, when French inventor, Henri Jacques Chrétien, developed an optical system called Hypergonar, to allow tank crews to have a wider view of the battlefield. After the war, filmmakers experimented with the technology, but it wasn’t until 1952 that it hit the big time, when the anamorphic technique was bought by Twentieth Century Fox to create something you’ve all heard of – CinemaScope. The first film released using it was the Biblical epic, ‘The Robe’, a year later

So what is anamorphic? It’s a special kind of lens that distorts its view in such a way that you get a widescreen image stretched into the 4:3 format of a film frame. When that film is played back through a projector fitted with an anamorphic lens, it ‘un-distorts’, displaying that widescreen image. This allows the full use of the negative, without cropping, enhancing levels of detail. The technique drifted out of use in the 90s and 2000s, but is popular again, making full use of the light gathering abilities of modern digital sensors.

CYLINDRICAL MIRROR SHOWING THE ANAMORPHISM

Le Grand Mint is now 10 years old, and what better way to mark the occasion than to issue a 10-ounce coin with a unique design. The base coin is simple enough, if quite the beast in size, reaching an impressive 130 mm in diameter. It carries on its reverse face a beautiful piece of artwork, which for half of its area, seems like a regular painting, but the other half looks warped, a nightmarish dragon.

That is, until you place the supplied cylindrical mirror, an ornate thing in its own right, at the centre of the coin. It’s here that the anamorphic effect does its stuff, and the mirror pulls in that unusually deformed dragon to form a striking, coherent, European-style dragon portrait. It’s all very clever, a brilliant demonstration of the century old technique, and quite unique in the numismatic world, something you know we love here.

The coin will come boxed with a Certificate of Authenticity, and include everything you need to get the effect. A terrific, innovative, and well realised coin that will make a great display item. Only 25 of these will be produced, and they sold out at the mint on the first full day, so go hit the dealers if you want one.