Art Direction and Production Design

Behind the Silver Screen Series

by Lucy Fischer

Art directors and production designers are the cinema's 'architects of illusion'. Their overall purpose is to produce the overall pictorial vision for a film and their skills encompass set design, storyboarding, painting, decoration, construction, budgeting, colour and special effects. This book examines the crafts of art direction and production design. It traces their contribution from Thomas Edison's primitive studio, the Black Maria, to the growth of the Hollywood 'studio system', to the effect of sound and colour, and on to the computer-generated imagery of contemporary Hollywood. It does so with reference to many major productions, including Gone with the Wind, McCabe and Mrs Miller and Batman, demonstrating the real significance of the contribution of the art director and production designer to filmmaking and its history.

Genres: Film, Design

216 pages, Paperback

First published March 9, 2015

About the author

Lucy Fischer is a Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies and directed the Film Studies Program at Pitt for three decades. Beyond teaching she has also had film curatorial experience at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Her interests in film studies are wide ranging and include international cinema of both the silent and sound era as well as narrative and experimental film.

Her particular fields include cultural and feminist studies, film theory, film aesthetics, women and film, film and literature, and the relationships between film, consciousness and desire. Aside from publishing 9 books, her articles have appeared in many journals, including: Screen, Film History, Sight and Sound, Camera Obscura, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, Women and Performance, Frauen und Film, and Film Quarterly.

Her essays have been anthologized 30 times in volumes of film history, criticism, and theory. She has lectured internationally in Israel, Switzerland, Holland, Austria, Scotland, Great Britain, Portugal, and Australia and has taught abroad in Germany, Sweden, and on the Semester at Sea program of the University of Pittsburgh (which traveled around the world). She recently completed editing an issue of the Portuguese journal, Anglo-Saxonia, and her latest book, Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History.

Reviews

[Craine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nice introduction into the sadly under looked aspects of both art and production design where historical emphasis has been much more to the favor of directors who again have only been eclipsed by the attention of the actors themselves in films. The book takes a linear historical approach to the subject matter which is fine with me, starting from the silent era here aptly named " The Silent Screen 1897-1927" and ending with what the book calls "Hollywood's digital backlot" where matte paintings have been replaced by its digital counterpart or alternatively that of green/blue screens.

Highlights include the quotes and anecdotes given by the industry people themselves where Patrizia von Brandenstein and her work on the film "Breaking Away" stands particularly out for me. In all a quick recommend for anyone interesting to the makings of film where one certainly cannot credit the director for everything that happens in the production phase of the film and this book is a nice testament to that.


Note: I don't like the star rating and as such I only rate books based upon one star or five stars corresponding to the in my opinion preferable rating system of thumbs up/down. This later rating system increases in my humble opinion the degree to which the reader is likely to engage with a review instead of merely glancing at the number of stars of a given book.)