Critical Approaches to TV and Film Set Design

Geraint D'Arcy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351795500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The analysis of scenic design in film and television is often neglected, with visual design elements relegated to part of the mise-en-scène in cinema or simply as "wallpaper" in television. Critical Approaches to TV and Film Set Design positions itself from the audience perspective to explore how we watch TV and film, and how set design enhances and influences the viewing experience.

By using semiotics, history and narratology and adding concepts drawn from art, architecture and theatre, Geraint D'Arcy reworks the key concepts of set design. Looking at the impact of production design on how the viewer reads film and television, these updated theories can be applied more flexibly and extensively in academic criticism. D'Arcy creates a new theoretical approach, representing a significant expansion of the field and filling the remaining gaps.

This book is ideal for anyone interested in understanding how we can read and interpret design in film and television, and should be the primary point of reference for those studying TV and film set design.

1
Critical Underpinnings

To understand design in film and television, our position cannot be that of a naïve observer of film, watching simply because it entertains. In film theory, ‘the discovery that resemblance is coded and therefore learned was a tremendous hard-won victory for semiotics over the upholding a notion of naïve perception in cinema.’ (Andrew, 1984. 25) We must acknowledge that film and television are complex texts which are made up of multiple elements and that they have meanings which affect us. An understanding of the ins and outs of how film studies came into being is not necessary, but the argument referred to by Dudley Andrew above in his book Concepts in Film Theory paved the way for contemporary film studies. Re-examining that particular battle is not necessary to understand this book, but an overview of some of the battlegrounds are: in particular, history, semiotics, mise-en-scène and cinemetrics. These are the key critical approaches which are used to underpin the discussions of film and television set design and cannot be easily sidestepped: history can be used to identify important source material for study; semiotics can identify those sources as texts which we can study; knowing about mise-en-scène will help us be more precise when dealing with expanded or texts of great size; cinemetrics will give us an understanding of how the design can be identified as a text within the film and television text. This chapter provides a brief overview of these underlying methodologies which will help make sense of the more design specific theories looked at in later chapters.

Histories

This book opens with a history. The subject of the next chapter is based on a historical approach, but it does not intend to write another history of early film or to consolidate the idea that Auguste and Louis Lumière (1862–1954; 1864–1948) invented modern cinema with their cinematograph, or to challenge it with a history which celebrates the work of Max and Emil Skladanowsky (1863–1939; 1866–1945?) and their Bioscop, or Louis le Prince’s (1841–1890?) work instead (Thompson & Bordwell, 1994. 8–10). The history of the Lumière brothers is well documented, whilst those of their “competitors” is less well known though temptingly mysterious: Emil Skladanowsky’s death date is hard to pin down, and Louis le Prince disappeared at the age of 49 in suspicious circumstances. The temptation with all introductions to the history of a subject, especially one which is technologically driven, is to find a precursor to a modern technology from which to begin a timeline which leads to our present moment. The problem is that the timeline only presents a single chosen “course” of history which flies along a direct route to now. This is known in historicism as determinism, the belief that all past moments have led inevitably and unwaveringly to this one. So, just as trying to find the earliest example of film is complicated, plotting all of the significant moments in the history of an artistic medium is nigh-on impossible. A time-line would not resemble time’s arrow, or even a straight line but would look more like a tube, or subway map. Each stop or station on that map would have its own route or track and each station would be as complex and as significant as the last. To put together a map of the most important and media shifting moments of film and television history would be a mammoth undertaking. It is better to read widely the histories that are available and piece together a route through those histories which is useful to the project being undertaken, and just as you do not get off at every stop on the underground when travelling across a city we do not have to get off every stop here, but we can be aware of the many different places we can visit as we travel along by being aware of the current film and television histories.

There are many splendid film histories available to anyone who is interested in early cinema, and many which detail events and occurrences from many different periods, since the emergence of cinema as a technological and artistic form. Of particular note and of general usefulness as a starting point for anyone interested in the history of cinema is the very approachable Film History: An Introduction (1994) by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell. This book, currently in its third edition, presents a very thorough starting point to any film student looking to delve deeper into film in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Framed ‘as a large-scale narrative’, Thompson and Bordwell’s work ‘synthesizes several histories and leaves others to other scholars’ (1994. xlii) It works as a companion piece to their other introductory textbook: Film Art: An Introduction (Bordwell and Thompson, 1993). Thompson and Bordwell’s approach is to survey as widely as possible a century of world cinema and to try to explain the shifts and changes in the industry lead by individuals or groups of practitioners who lend their influence to others and make significant artistic works. This is no mean feat however and they do it very carefully: writing history ‘is like looking into a microscope and discovering that a drop of water teams with organisms’ (1994. xxxviii), and with an ever-increasing amount of material to go through and understand the limitations have to be set.

Historians divide their subject into periods or epochs or ask questions which find their answers in narrower fields whilst acknowledging that ‘[n]o historian can avoid leaving material out. For one thing the record is already incomplete’ (1994. xxxviii). There are some which organise films into arrangements of type or style and some which have been drawn together through interests in technology or politics. Wading through these histories can be complicated and the temptation is to begin making timelines which reliably inform the reader of dates and events in the order in which they happened to give stability to something which ought to be stable. History tends not to be stable however, historical accounts vary from each other, sometimes quite radically. A pursuit of empirical facts such as the release dates of a film, or even when a film was made can vary with new information turning up all of the time: new material being uncovered; mistakes in the primary sources; misreadings of secondary sources; accounts given first hand but years after the event; biased accounts presented at the time and denied years later. Whatever the historical pitfall, all affect how a history is written and pieced together. Most published histories are rigorous and as reliable as histories can be, but even then, they should not be seen as fixed, permanent or completely correct. What is undeniable though is that history is about things which have happened; how they end up recorded is dependent on the historian themselves and what they aim to ask or question about the past. Good historians will acknowledge that ‘it really happened, and we really can find out how it happened and reach some tenable though always less than final conclusions about what it all meant’ (Evans, 1997. 253).

If we acknowledge that there will always be another reading of the same material, another history seen slightly differently then we can begin to understand what the past has to offer us when it comes to understanding how things were and how things are, but we must not fall into the trap of believing that things are now, because the past led to it. Historical determinism must be avoided because it clouds the issues: if we are intent on proving or justifying the present, we will never see what else happened in the past clearly enough. In film and television design history, it would be easy to see all technological developments and innovations as leading directly to the current state of cinema and television but such an approach would miss the mistakes and the failures, or the things which were leftfield, experimental or just down-right bizarre but hugely influential.

Histories of Film and Television Set Design

Every book written about film design opens with a history. Leon Barsacq’s historicizing of film set design begins with a survey of the ‘film primitives’ the Lumière brothers and swiftly moves on to the ‘pioneering’ work of Georges Méliès (Barsacq, 1976. 5–15), but avoids looking at the practical and artistic demands of the naturalistic movements in theatre, photography, art and literature, or at the similar movement of realism in theatre and literary drama. This omission is often compounded in subsequent histories: Jane Barnwell (2004), C.S. Tashiro (1998) and Charles and Mirella Affron (1995) frame the history of scenic design as something which seems to be born of nothing other than the technological pressures of the cinema camera and its frame. Even works like Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs’ Theatre to Cinema (1997) frame the similarities with the theatre as an industrial and technical precursor. Their history concentrates on the restrictions of the forms and looks at the separation of cinema and theatre as competing media rather than explore what happened to how the forms made art. Very rarely do any of the set design histories which this book draws upon talk about what happened to the art or to the way the subjects of the art affected our ideas of representation or of the real. This book will redress that balance and it will begin, like so many others, with a history. But it is not a history that wants to prove the subject worthy and it is not a history that wants to break the mould of all other histories that have gone before; it is a history of trying to make believable worlds.

Very few texts directly approach film set design or production design from a critical perspective, and most of them begin with a historical survey of early film, some progress in this manner until the early years of the twenty-first century, such as Laurie. N. Ede’s British Film Design (2010), whilst most are academically focused upon particular eras such as Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (Bergfelder, Harris and Street, 2007), Ben McCann’s Ripping Open the Set: French Film Design 1930–1939 (2013) or Juan Antonio Ramirez’s Architecture for the Screen: A Critical Study of Set Design in Hollywood’s Golden Age (2012). These books look at small periods of film history in great detail giving the ins and outs of the establishment of the film industry and providing details in surveys and collected anecdotes about the historical contexts, and the people involved in film production and some insight into the influences of their respective nations and periods. Some like Ramirez and McCann offer brief insights into new ways of looking at or considering design critically and both will be examined in more detail later.

If there are only a few histories dedicated to surveying film design, fewer still look at television set design with the only significant work forming parts of other studies or being noted in passing in other histories of the form. Lynn Spigel’s TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (2008) is one of the few to actually acknowledge set design in some detail as reflective of a changing aesthetic awareness in the US public establishing the links between the establishment of the modern art movement and commercial television in the US in the post-war years. For the most part Spigel’s history focuses on the larger challenge of surveying the shifting stories which surrounded the growth of the industry in the US although its focus is predominated by technological discussions and shifts in attitudes and forms influenced by and influencing the public since the technology was developed, in this way Spigel’s work is similar to the histories of British television like Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey’s British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future (2014) or Lez Cooke’s British Television Drama: A History (2003) which explore the growth and change of British television in similar periods through the social impact of television on domestic life and culture.

With the important historical works identified, there then comes the task of being able to understand those works in more complex ways. Our ability to “read” film, to understand what is happening and follow its transitions, as fast as we see it appear on a screen is something which hinges upon our understanding of the world in which we live for which history remains useful, but with different experiences comes different reference systems which we employ when we look at an image. The study of this is called semiotics and to progress beyond a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Histories and Contexts
• 1 Critical Underpinnings
• 2 Film, Realism and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis in Representation
• 3 Television, History, Realism
• 4 Architecture and Film
• 5 Narrative and Film Design
• 6 Reading Television Design Through Genre and Narrative
• 7 Dramatic Function in Spatial Design
• 8 Conclusion
• Index