Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street,
Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema.
Amsterdam University Press, 1970
ISBN: 978 90 5356 984 9
US$39.50 (pb)
320pp
(Review copy supplied by Amsterdam University Press)

This is at once a very useful book and a flawed book. Any study that deals seriously with the place of set design in the cinema is to be welcomed, and the 1920s and 1930s were a moment when set designers began to recognise the important role they could, and arguably should, play in the conception and elaboration of a cinematic project. This study assembles a mass of information on the key designers of that period, the principles on which they based their work, and certain of their best-known films. For this we can be grateful; the book will remain a useful reference work.

One of its main aims is to foreground the role of émigré designers displaced from Russia by the revolution, then from Berlin and Vienna by the rise of fascism, as they move through Germany, France and England (not to mention the USA). But this émigré thesis is no great revelation – not nearly as much as the authors seem at times to be claiming – since numerous studies have identified the powerful influence of Russian and German émigré personnel on Western European cinema in those years. Indeed it is a little ironic that, with such an internationalist thesis, the study should be divided into separate national segments dealing respectively with Germany, France and England. An inevitable consequence of this division is that the same designers, their work practices and even sometimes their same films are recapitulated in each country they move through. This inevitably leads to a great deal of irritating repetition. Late in the book, people and ideas, already discussed at length, are still being presented as if they had never been mentioned before. The same is true of styles, and notably the ‘moderne’ style, which is introduced at least four times, and is still being defined on p254 as if never before mentioned. This may in part be due to the book resulting from a collaboration between three different authors, each of whom specialises in one of the three countries under discussion, but it doesn’t say much either for the closeness of that collaboration or for the editing (which incidentally is also at fault for leaving in the text numerous clumsy expressions and at least a dozen serious misspellings).

Some useful points are made concerning the contribution of the various émigré set-designers to the representation of the past (through historical films), of the future (through sci-fi films) and of national identity (both of their countries of origin and of their adopted countries), but again these points are made several times over in different sections. Sometimes rather than repetition there is simple unmediated contradiction, as when one section (one author?) claims that the use of Art Déco in film addressed the spectators as consumers, inciting them to buy, while another (another author?) sees it rather as aiming to inspire awe and even fear. Consequently it is hard not to see the underlying flaw in the book as a problem of structure, due to its organisation by nation, when a preferable organisation might have been by designer, by design theory, by genre or by style/technique/degree of realism.

An important idea mentioned early on is that set-design, although coming into its own in these years, cannot be dissociated from other areas of production – most particularly camera-work and lighting, of course, but more generally the director’s and the team’s attitude towards realism. One cannot, for instance, sensibly discuss attempts to render set-design ‘invisible’ without considering the whole ideology of ‘invisible technology,’ just as one cannot discuss its opposite – virtuoso set-design – without seeing it as one element in the virtuoso use of all aspects of film technology, based on the self-understanding of team members as ‘artists’ whose work should be remarked as expressive. Mentioned early on, these matters are often forgotten in later sections relating to specific national cinemas and specific films.

One topic that is usefully discussed at several points is the difference between painterly set design and architectural set design, and the tendency to move from the former to the latter with the advent of sound. Another useful discussion is the influence of multiple language versions (and some films were made in 12 or 14 different language versions) on the development and articulation of a trans-national visual aesthetic. In general the sections relating to German cinema are most meaty, those on the French cinema mostly reliable (though it is rather strange to see French criticism still described as introverted, blinkered, and obsessed with the national psyche), and those on the British cinema as the least productive of new understanding (though admittedly I may be prejudiced here). Certainly the decision to focus the British chapter on four pairs of generic films designed respectively by Meerson and Korda does not, as claimed, lead to any revelatory contrasts in set design practices, nor for that matter does it identify any useful similarities. Overall the decision to base each of these national chapters on the close analysis of eight to ten specific films militates against any sense of overall coverage. The conclusions are too often inconclusive: there is a certain randomness about the films chosen for analysis, and a slightly desperate desire to make them say more than they want to. Nevertheless I would not like to be too negative about a book that provides such a mass of information on a key aspect of film production. Moreover I was predisposed to enjoy this book by learning from Juan Antonio Ramirez in the opening pages that

“At Paramount (…) a single outdoor set respectively served to represent Venice, New York, Shanghaï, Moscow, a part of Marseilles at the time of the Crusades, a bazaar in Cairo, Madrid, Havana, Berlin, Singapore, Yokohama, and so on. This venerable and versatile structure, initially erected around 1925, was demolished without ceremony towards the end of 1937.”

Colin Crisp,
Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 17 July 2008