The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers (Culture and Economic Life) by Alison Gerber

Author:Alison Gerber [Gerber, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

6

Doing Things with Words

ANN IS A SCULPTOR, PAINTER, AND FILMMAKER; she also works as a scenic artist. When we met in a sunny ice cream parlor, she pulled out her computer, and moving quickly through images from dozens of films, she pointed out things she had done: she showed me brickwork she had made from scratch to fit a film’s era, fake walls she’d built. “I had to make that old-fashioned linoleum. I actually had to make that, tile by tile.” It is clear to me, rereading the transcript from our conversation, that she knows she is speaking to someone who knows little about her profession. “There’s one real wall and then two fake walls. The fake walls have to look like the real wall. So the wood grain has to match and the marble has to match.” She showed me a photo of an old house with a fence, and told me about making them: “In this scene, a train goes through a fence. We had to make the fence look like it had been there for fifty years, so we had to make all the wood look really old. And when the train goes through, we had to have the pieces of wood fly up in the air and look like they were really old pieces of wood. Even though they were all brand-new.” She was speaking both to and about me when she said, later, “A lot of people just don’t really get that there’s scenic art that’s done for movies.” When I asked what she thought people saw of her work in a finished movie, she said simply, “They don’t see. I would say 90% of the people do not see. They don’t have . . . they’re shocked when they discover they’re not seeing what they think they’re seeing.” For much of our conversation, I was one of these 90%, and she tried to educate me—but suddenly, near the end of our interview, she included me in her circle, in the other 10%. We were talking about films, and found that we both enjoyed a particular type of staginess. The film Moonrise Kingdom had recently opened, and in talking about it, we moved into a shared space.

I had asked whether she had seen anything recently that she loved. She exclaimed, eyes shining: “Oh my God. Moonrise Kingdom.” I nodded, leaned in: “Oh, yeah. That was a beautiful movie.” She began to tell me, with a knowing tone, precisely why I thought so: “Now, that is a really cool movie for a couple of reasons, because that movie has elements that are obviously fantasy, but they’re so perfectly done that it works. Like all those hokey little tents that are so corny but very wonderful. It’s like a fairy tale come to life.” I broke in, maybe cut her off a bit: “Yeah. All of his visual worlds are really immersive when you’re actually watching them. And I find it strange to watch them because I think you’re very aware .

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