Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner

by David Winton Bell Gallery (Brown University), Dietrich Neumann (Editor), Donald Albrecht (Editor)

It may be the catalogue for an exhibit mounted first at Brown University, but in the way it explores the set designs of films produced in Weimar, Germany, and later, Film Architecture doesn't read like scaffolding to an event long past. Beginning with oddball stuff like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari whose tilting, dream-curved sets would appeal equally to Virginia Woolf (who praised its visual shorthand for the nervous metropolis) and the Viennese architect Adolf Loos (who saw the possibilities in its plastic city), the book devotes sections to big-look movies like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, King Vidor's The Fountainhead, and Jacques Tati's Playtime. Each film, the authors argue, further explores the psychologically charged spaces that Dr. Caligari first created, and each eventually incorporates the look of actual cities within its urban visions. As much a collection of photographs of film sets as an examination of Expressionist influences on filmic cityscapes from the 1920s to the near-present, Film Architecture is full of information--for example, that the abiding strangeness of Tati's work in Mon Oncle "elicited furious responses from members of the architectural profession." (Does this happen outside France?) And that Playtime's singular vision of modernity also, in some respects, shapes a film about building developments in Paris, including the glassy Gare Montparnasse and the "infamous Sarcelles" in the 'burbs. With reproductions of sketches for sets and glossy images of darkling cities, the book shows over and over that our love of cities is inseparable from the way movies regularly shade them into our unconscious. --Lyall Bush

Genres: Architecture, Film, Nonfiction, Design, Art

207 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1996

Reviews

[ben c · Rating 4 out of 5]

good sourcebook but a bit inaccessible,
i bought it for the background and artists concept drawings for the 1984 film Bladerunner, which was a favourite in college days
there's a lot of historical stuff on early 20C 'b' movies etc

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very heavy going book there are no two ways about it. There are essays about film making and architecture which are either reproductions of an exhibition on the subject or are notes and observations taken from the films and their contributors, however it is a fascinating insight in to the creative drives of the people who helped shape some of the most influential films of the genre.

[Meikoningin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it in English. Reviewed on FB.