A Companion to Russian Cinema by Beumers Birgit;

Author:Beumers, Birgit; [Beumers, Birgit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2016-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Set Design: The Scholarly Field

Outside the Russian and Soviet field, some scholarly attention has been paid to set design, but the field is still sparse. This is because, as Bergfelder, Harris, and Street point out (2007, 11–13), the set is often an “invisible” element of the film. Exceptionally, Charles and Mirella Affron have attempted to provide a classification for different types of cinematic set, ranging from “Sets as Denotation” (largely invisible, non-signifying background), through to “Sets as Artifice” (highly visual and responsible for a large part of the film’s overall impact) (Affron and Affron 1995, 37–40). These categories reflect a key question, which recurs in historical and theoretical discussions of set design: is the set an independently expressive part of the film in itself, or a servant of the plot? For the Affrons, a good set is one that “serves” the narrative. Charles S. Tashiro, by contrast, is concerned to show how the impact of design can exceed the limits of the narrative. Citing Léon Barsacq’s insistence that “one of the fundamental requirements of the cinema [is] to give the impression of having photographed real objects” (Barsacq 1976, 7), he suggests that “those objects have meanings of their own exploited by the designer that have nothing to do with the script” (Tashiro 1998, 6).

This tension, which Tashiro describes as a tension between “visible expression and invisible neutrality” (Tashiro 1998, xvi), underpinned the debates on the role of film production design during the first decades of the twentieth century. In their recent volume, Bergfelder, Harris, and Street have explored the development of set design in France, Britain, and Germany, focusing on the period from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, as “the moment in film history in which set design was given more prominence and attention that perhaps during any other period” (Bergfelder, Harris, and Street 2007, 25). In Hollywood, the establishment of the studio system brought ever more lavish production design; in Germany, the influence of Expressionism brought about a wholesale revolution in the role of the film designer, most famously realized in Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920]; in Paris, émigré Russian designers linked to the Albatros group were pioneering “a modern, performative conception of décor,” with a new emphasis on multi-dimensional space (Bergfelder, Harris, and Street 2007, 58). Despite the influence of Russian émigrés on film design in the period under discussion, Bergfelder, Harris, and Street do not discuss Soviet cinema itself. This omission is consistent in histories of production design: Léon Barsacq, one of the only writers even to address the question of Soviet cinema, discounts its studio/interior shots, praising it instead for the “perfection of its exterior shots” (Barsacq 1976, 47).3 The so-called “poverty” of early Soviet set design is commonly attributed to the underfunded state of film production during the 1920s. Looking more closely at interior sets of this period, however, and at the debates surrounding design in the film press, we discover a rich vein of experimentation.

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