Architecture for the Screen: A Critical Study of Set Design in Hollywood's Golden Age by Juan Antonio Ramirez Review by: Colin Burnett Film Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Spring 2007), pp. 85-86 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2007.60.3.85 . Accessed: 21/11/2013 23:57 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
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Gledhill’s outstanding research and open approach to the subject matter allow her to repeatedly refute much orthodoxy concerning the history of the British cinema. In chapters on acting styles and the relationship between the British stage and screen, Gledhill posits the radical notion that perhaps the division between film and theater has been somewhat overstated and that in the British context an analysis of the connection between the two might be more productive that fixing on their differences. This approach is particularly useful in relation to British acting style and its embrace of an aesthetic of restraint. This quality, which she ties quite persuasively to ideals and tensions within the larger British culture, is shown to transcend the division between the theatrical and the cinematic to become a pathway towards the exploration of more fundamental issues of class and national character. Also, rather than seeing British film culture as suspended industrially and artistically between the United States and Europe, as so many other works have maintained, Gledhill demonstrates that the British cinema of the period was instead the product of a variety of indigenous influences ranging from the theatrical and literary works of the times to the importance of the English landscape and the complexities of its class structure. She is particularly informative in conveying the impact of a tradition of narrative pictorialism on the British filmmakers of the time that goes a long way towards explaining the industry’s predilection for mise-en-scène and composition as opposed to the spatial and temporal fragmentation of editing that was changing cinematic practice in the U.S., Europe, and the Soviet Union. Gledhill refers to her method as cultural poetics, a term that seems familiar but in this case takes on something of a fresh significance, as she merges extraordinarily in-depth research, both theoretical and primary, a precision of cinematic description that has rarely been equaled, a willingness to thoroughly examine, and if necessary discard, previously held beliefs about the subject, all in the service of illuminating not merely the British film industry that serves as the focal subject of the study, but also British culture at large. Her conclusions about the place of the cinema in negotiating issues of social class, heritage, and modernization, as well as her clear and useful methodology extend the value of this study beyond a renewed understanding of British film during its darkest hour, towards the establishment of a broader relationship between cinema and culture. Now we all must see the Cutts–Ivor Novello collaboration, The Rat (1925), Elvey’s Hindle Wakes (1927), Adrian Brunel’s The Man Without Desire (1923), and George Cooper’s If Youth But Knew (1926), just to begin to enjoy and understand the work of this previously neglected period in British national cinema. EVAN LIEBERMAN teaches in the Film Studies department at Emory University in Atlanta and is currently working on a book entitled The Moving Image with David Cook for Oxford University Press. © Evan Lieberman, 2007
A R T A N D I N D U S T RY Architecture for the Screen: A Critical Study of Set Design in Hollywood’s Golden Age By Juan Antonio Ramirez. Jefferson, NC: McFarlane, 2004. $45.00 cloth. 247 pages.
Though largely unknown to an English-speaking readership, Juan Antonio Ramirez has been, since the late 1970s, one of Spain’s most appreciated art historians. Author of such quirky studies as Edificios y sueños (Buildings and Dreams, 1991) and The Beehive Metaphor (1998), which traces the iconographic influence of the beehive and apian communities upon architectural design of the Modern movement, Ramirez’s work often tackles a familiar subject (in Beehive: Gaudí, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright) from an imaginative point of view, but never at the expense of rigorous research and pointed, sober commentary about the surfaces and meanings of the artworks in question. Originally published in Spanish in 1986 (just months before Donald Albrecht’s seminal Designing Dreams: Architecture in the Movies), Architecture for the Screen is one of the few serious book-length studies devoted to the art and styles of film set design. With this book, Ramirez contributes to a small but growing literature, which includes the first significant history of the field, Léon Barsacq’s Le Décors du film (1970; published in English as Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions [1976]); the richly illustrated Screen Deco (1985) and Forties Style (1989), both penned by Howard Mandelbaum and Eric Myers; and Beverly Heisner’s two books, Hollywood Art: Art Direction in the Days of the Great Studios (1990) and Production Design in the Contemporary American Film (1997). Inventive and meticulous (even though it is let down by some sloppy copy-editing for this edition), Architecture for the Screen is a valuable, pioneering contribution to an underdeveloped area of film research. Translator John F. Moffitt introduces Ramirez’s method as “iconological,” engaged in “an intense interpretive treatment of the historical metamorphosis of cultural themes underlying certain art works” (1). But, cognizant that his readership may not be familiar with the métier of set design, Ramirez does not embark immediately on interpretation. The first half of the book addresses style in set design in terms of the techniques and crafts that comprise the art. Here, Ramirez’s masterful handling of primary sources is on full display as he unearths and analyzes critical and on-set accounts relating to the design process. He investigates the influx of design talent from outside the film industry (several prominent set designers brought with them techniques and styles from architecture, stage and interior design, painting, and illustration), devotes considerable attention to set construction and dressing, as well as the building of permanent and impermanent, complete and fragmentary sets. It is in these sections that Ramirez examines the factors that lead to the forging of individual and group styles, the working conditions for set designers (which tended to vary from studio to
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studio), the impact of the coming of sound upon design strategies, and the overall “driving functionalism” of design techniques (93). The second half carries Ramirez’s Panofskyian project forward by detailing the manner in which Hollywood designers borrow from and alter for the sake of the screen a range of architectural styles, from Mesopotamian to colonial baroque to art deco. “Given the Eclectic climate of American architecture,” he notes in reference to an instructive example, “‘Baroque’ décors might often appear in movies with storylines not necessarily set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (168). The underlying premise here is that the moviegoer’s eye had been trained, given the proliferation and manipulation of styles in actual architecture, not to expect filmmakers to commit themselves to designs that are geographically or historically authentic, allowing the cinema to develop its own architectural symbology. Pried free of its original context, the “decorative overload” of such films as Dracula (1931), Dodsworth (1936), and Camille (1937) congeal into a uniquely cinematic architectural style, which Ramirez dubs “Bourgeois Baroque” in order to capture the symbolic rather than historical purchase of this form. Camille’s “exaggerated and curved moldings” therefore denote “wealth, distinction, power”—elements required in a film of this genre but having little to do with the historic baroque period (168). In fact, Ramirez eventually concludes that the pattern of development of particular architectural styles in film history shows that certain designs eventually became affixed to particular film genres. Linking these two halves is the thesis that the first few decades of the twentieth century, characterized by the “ahistorical appropriation” and deliberate stylization “of diversely historical architectural styles,” or “Eclecticism,” “enjoyed a double resurrection, both in real buildings and on the silver screen” (114). Hollywood set design therefore manifested in its own ways a period style in American architectural design. Yet, Ramirez’s conception of the history of Hollywood “scenographic” style by no means miscalculates the complexity of the pressures and influences of film practice upon production design. He avoids the trap of contending that Hollywood pictures from the 1920s to the 1950s simply exemplified a dominant style in an art form whose currents are potentially altogether separate from those of cinema. Set and production designers like Anton Grot and Joseph Urban may have been imported from outside the industry, and the sets they designed may have exhibited the traits of movements within American architecture, but successful designers do not “go into business for themselves” and design sets that ignore the force of habit in Hollywood storytelling: “one cannot overemphasize the fact that the function of architecture in the movies was/is primarily and essentially dramatic” (215). Indeed, Ramirez’s analysis of the give-and-take between architectural forms and cinematic ones confirms art historian Jonathan Gilmore’s assertion in his 2000 book, The Life of A Style, that any dominant or higher-level style (in this case, Hollywood classicism) can be the platform for lower-level styles that serve the same motives that propel the dominant
one but that, nevertheless, can function semi-autonomously. In this way, the syncretistic impetus of set designers can coexist with and serve the conventions of classical continuity. The ultimate value of Ramirez’s study lies in the balance it creates between a conscious and appropriate introductory tone, on the one hand, and scrupulous research and sophisticated understanding of the intricacies of the history of film style, on the other. The author reminds us that architectural style of sets in the classical period served a complex mix of motives. Because many set designers were not originally film artists or craftsmen (but rather imported for prestige reasons, to create non-narrative attractions to whet the appetite of an expanding audience), they were especially influenced by figures and movements outside film. Perhaps unlike any other prominent practitioner in the history of American moviemaking, the set designer of the classical period shouldered the burden of several artistic traditions—the demands of the classical continuity system for “functional” sets, the historical–stylistic architectural traditions of the past, and the imaginative reinterpretation of these styles in the vein of twentieth-century American architectural revivalism. COLIN BURNETT is a Ph.D. candidate in Film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. © Colin Burnett, 2007
Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers By Lisa Kernan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. $60.00 cloth; $22.95 paperback. 308 pages
Lisa Kernan’s book, adapted from her 2000 UCLA dissertation, is the first extended attempt to treat trailers as a specific form and her sophisticated analysis demonstrates that the form is rich enough to sustain the attention. If anything, the textual and contextual density of this commercial–narrative hybrid provides Kernan with too much to work with. The book’s theoretical chapters cast a particularly broad net of approaches, setting up expectations for their development in the close analyses that are in many cases unfulfilled. Eisenstein, Brecht, Metz, Iser, Barthes, Ernst Bloch, Gérard Genette, Susan Stewart, Kenneth Burke, not to mention a claim for the carnivalesque all briefly make early walk-on cameos before largely disappearing from the body of the book. However, her rhetoric-based analysis, synthesizing the languages of both semiotic and commodity theories, effectively draws on a wide range of previous film scholarship, particularly genre and star theory, which she uses to good effect in drawing out the contradictions of trailers’ elaborate dance of revealing and concealing. Kernan is most impressive in analyzing how trailers create “consciousness” both anticipatory and nostalgic, not only within “their rhetoric per se” but “in the ‘spaces between’ the images of the trailer montage” (216). From a list of some 850 viewed examples from UCLA’s archives, Kernan picks nine case studies “that clearly and interestingly demonstrated the rhetorical inscription of as-
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