![]() ![]() Midcentury architects and designers would be equally stunned by the "workflow" of their counterparts today, given the crucial role of computational processes in what used to be a primarily manual art. 2 Architectural design remains one of the fundamental acts of film production in the digital age, though the tools would, of course, be unrecognizable to anyone schooled in the ways of the old Hollywood studios. 1 The "painstaking efforts" described by Sternad were primarily focused on the design and fabrication of space: a building's exterior architecture and interior decoration, the facades lining a city street and their extension toward the horizon, the quasi-natural landscapes with mountains and prairies rendered in plaster and paint, and countless other mainstays of cinematic world creation and art department tradecraft. As the veteran art director Rudolph Sternad noted in 1952, "movies are 90 percent physical," and for that reason the production process would seek elegant, cost-effective solutions to a broad range of "physical problems" at the core of the production process. Another foundational account is less prominent and intuitive, but equally essential to an understanding of film in the studio era: classical cinema was a spatial and environmental art that situated stories and bodies within a world created in part or entirely on the studio lot. These accounts would be familiar to almost anyone exposed to mainstream movies in the United States, which is to say, just about everyone. Classical Hollywood cinema was a narrative art, a spectacle centered on stars, and an industry producing entertainment for profit. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |