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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TV
AND FILM SET DESIGN
The analysis of scenic design in film and television is often neglected, with visual
design elements relegated to part of the mise-en-scène in cinema or simply as
“wallpaper” in television. Critical Approaches to TV and Film Set Design positions
itself from the audience perspective to explore how we watch TV and film, and
how set design enhances and influences the viewing experience.
By using semiotics, history and narratology and adding concepts drawn from
art, architecture and theatre, Geraint D’Arcy reworks the key concepts of set
design. Looking at the impact of production design on how the viewer reads film
and television, these updated theories can be applied more flexibly and extensively
in academic criticism. D’Arcy creates a new theoretical approach, representing a
significant expansion of the field and filling the remaining gaps.
This book is ideal for anyone interested in understanding how we can read
and interpret design in film and television, and should be the primary point of
reference for those studying TV and film set design.
Geraint D’Arcy
First published 2019
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Geraint D’Arcy to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: D’Arcy, Geraint, 1979- author.
Title: Critical approaches to TV and film set design/Geraint D’Arcy.
Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020292| ISBN 9781138636569 (hardback : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9781138636507 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781315205939 (e-book : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Television—Stage-setting and scenery. | Motion
pictures—Setting and scenery.
Classification: LCC PN1992.8.S7 D37 2019 | DDC 791.4502/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020292
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
Acknowledgementsvi
1 Critical Underpinnings 10
8 Conclusion 207
Index221
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to Anna Solic and Jo Durnall, from the University of South
Wales who welcomed me on to the course, maybe a little too eagerly, and seemed
delighted that I wanted to teach their students theory and write this book.Thanks
for their support and their willingness to let me experiment with and bore their
students over the last few years. Thanks to those students, who let me. Thanks as
well to Eleanor Wood who arrived late but whose support has been much appre-
ciated in the final stages and so was actually just in time.
Thanks to Jesse Schwenk for early and continuing encouragement and discus-
sion and some books to borrow, to Brian Fagence for his support and for listen-
ing to me go on, and to Michael Carklin and Ian McNish for cheering from the
side-lines.
Thanks most of all to my family, especially Jeanette, Liet and Alia D’Arcy, for
putting up with me being grumpy and distracted and for humouring me when I
made you watch films you weren’t really interested in.
INTRODUCTION
Histories and Contexts
FIGURE 0.1B Profondo Rosso. Marcus walks home past Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.
FIGURE 0.1C Profondo Rosso. Marcus walks home past Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.
Introduction 3
FIGURE 0.1D Profondo Rosso. A film full of faces, mirrors and missed details.
This book is about identifying and talking about how design affects an audience.
It is addressed to designers and film and television makers, to those just starting
out and those with experience, but it is from the point of view of the audience.
Those whom films are for.
It is important not to read this book in isolation, it is not a text-book or a guide
to better film design but a book which is offering a fresh way of looking at film
design. The aim is to show how the critical academic material that is available can
be used more thoroughly in general film analysis and also how it can be used to
create thoughtful, well-considered designs. This book is not intended to compete
or counter-act any of the work that already exists about television and film set
design, but it will not passively accept it as correct or unflawed. It will criticise
that work and evaluate its usefulness, and it will supplement it and offer new and
different ways of thinking.
There are some scholars who, like Jane Barnwell have excellent access to the
contemporary industry and are doing exciting work bringing insights into working
production designers who have worked on award winning films or long run-
ning TV serials. In Production Design (2004) and Production Design for Screen: Visual
Storytelling in Film and TV (2017), Barnwell takes the processes of film design and
shows how they can be used to understand and deliberately engage with metaphor
and poetic visuals to ‘enhance and heighten aspects of the story’ (Barnwell, 2017.
57). This is useful work to be aware of when reading this book, as it always pulls
the discussion back towards an exploration of the necessities of practice. It looks at
many processes of design which can be informed by theory and research from the
interpretation of scripts and deal with the creative vision of directors. Barnwell
takes theory and applies it to the raw materials of film-making in order to make
interesting designs for an audience to appreciate and leaves the more abstract
analysis and criticism to the film scholars. In this way she extends design from the
4 Introduction
individual designer, through the production process towards the finished film. It
is important because this book is working from the opposite direction: looking
from the armchair or cinema seat at the finished product, and having our own
take on the designs used in television and film. It is a contribution to film and
television criticism, but it is also a contribution to film and television set design
practice, because what it offers a designer is critical and evaluative distance from
their subject.
Often the analysis and criticism that exists in film studies is plentiful and is
sometimes accessible, sometimes too academic but nearly always it is a discus-
sion that sees the design aspects of a film as secondary to the writing directing
and acting. At most there is often mention of the confusingly defined idea of the
mise-en-scène (looked at in Chapter 1) which has conveniently grey, spongey
borders and plenty of definitions and many different examples. Sometimes in
the argument about mise-en-scène, design features as a part, often as a back drop
sometimes as “wall-paper” to the main contenders in that approach – the actor
and the action which occupy the foreground in the majority of films. Barnwell’s
work, however, places emphasis upon the vital role which production design ful-
fils in the film industry and offers insights both personal and collected from other
practicing designers about how to emphasize and explore the production of film
through making designs. Barnwell’s work is striking, because it is not a “how to”
design films, like Georgina Shorter’s Designing for the Screen: Production Design and
Art Direction Explained (2012), or Gerald Millerson’s TV Scenic Design (1997), but
rather a “what to consider” when designing them, and what will produce effective
film designs, using examples from the industry which explore the development
and creation of ideas and designs from the concept to the final execution.
The Book
This book deals with film and television history, and with the criticism of set
design. An awareness of any of these histories or of the approaches detailed in this
book is invaluable to anyone wishing to move into this field of academic study
and is useful to those who only wish to make more informed decisions in their
own film and television designs. It is not hard to be a “completist” in this area, it is
not impossible, for example, to write a history of production design that exhausts
every piece of readily available critical or secondary piece of reading on the sub-
ject. Though the focus of this work begins with the historical it does not remain
there, and the purpose of the history in this book is not to re-tread the same
ground as those who have already written remarkably detailed and interesting his-
tories but to pose a new set of questions and to establish a set of problems which
call for a deeper understanding of how production design can be understood and
what it contributes to the understanding of film texts.
The early chapters of this book are intended for the undergraduate or begin-
ner, to introduce some concepts and ways of thinking about the history of film
Introduction 5
and television which may not have been clear from other introductions to those
histories, or which deal with similar material to make an argument for the way
we understand the visual elements in those media.The later chapters are intended
for more advanced students of film and television set design, those who are aware
of some aspects of television studies and general film theory. The most important
theories are revised in Chapter 1 and underpin the key arguments of the book,
familiarity with these aspects is needed before investigating some of the more
specialized theories which are used to criticize television and film set design.
When the films are cited the common academic practice is to only include
the director’s name and not the writer or lead actor, production designer etc.; for
most of the book, films will attribute the director as the creator of the work, sim-
ply to make it clearer that The Thing (John Carpenter. 1985) is different from The
Thing (Matthijs van Heijningen. 2011) or from The Thing (Christian Nyby. 1951).
Television dramas will cite the main production company and a date range for the
same reason. It will avoid listing the many people who worked on the teams to
design those texts. Again, this is not to encourage or persist with ideas of author-
ity or pander to the concept of the auteur as the single author of a collaborative
process, but to make finding the examples cited easier.When directors are specifi-
cally referred to, imagine the person bound in chains of industrial collaborators.
Another distinction is that this book is about film and television design but
frequently and deliberately in some sections it may stray into talking about the
design of props and of costume. This is for the simple reason that when design
is considered as part of a film those elements all work together to make mean-
ing which is understood as one design by the layperson watching the film. For a
greater insight into costume design in film the work of Sarah Street, Costume and
Cinema: Dress Codes in Popular Cinema (2001), is an excellent place to start and
the instances where this book encroaches on that field are few. That is not to say
however, that the critical approaches and histories involved in this book cannot
contribute to studies into costume design or provoke studies into prop design, but
the main focus is upon the design of the sets and eventually how that makes us
consider the other spatial and designed aspects of film and television texts.
events of film and considers the artistic challenge it provoked in other art forms.
It provides an understanding of a film text which does not aim to be a complete
history, but as a historical provocation which makes us reconsider the purpose of
design in film. It will use the early innovative film work of the Lumières, Cecil
Hepworth and Georges Méliès to distinguish between the types of realism which
film presents despite always seeming to have photographed the real world accu-
rately. In artistic terms, most film histories begin with the Lumière brothers as an
advent or great event, this chapter begins with them as a serious problem, one that
was deeply involved with a crisis in representation in the nineteenth century and
one which we are still feeling the repercussions of in other art forms today. It con-
siders what happens to representational artistic forms when representation seems
so achievable in one medium and the crises it caused in the nineteenth century.
It will look at the tricky concepts of ideas of realism, naturalism and formalism in
film studies and in theatre studies and literature to expand upon our understand-
ing of realism as a fluid and expressive convention unique to each film text.
Chapter 3 will take a brief look at a transition point in television history, which
tries to respond to the same pressures of representation looked at in Chapter 2. It
will expand upon the difficulties of dealing with representation realistically in a
visual medium begun in the previous chapter and apply it to the unique circum-
stances of television.Televisual realism and cinematic realism have had a profound
effect on how television has been designed and upon how we understand televi-
sion fiction and drama. This chapter focuses on television as the financially-poor
cousin of cinema which has often been assumed to be the artistically poorer too.
As modernity affected cinema in varied ways and left the theatrical behind, tel-
evision did not and in some cases was specifically not allowed to. Its domesticity,
the fact that it was beamed into every home, meant that it was considered the
main competitor to radio so the content and style of dramatic broadcasting was
geared to compete with radio drama and historically this is what has often been
focused upon in television studies. Visually, however, the main competition was
found in the theatre of the mid-twentieth century and for a large part of the his-
tory of television the sets were heavily influenced by the realist theatre of that
period, and in some contemporary programming, this is still the case. But in the
mid-sixties there was a shift in filming technologies and the introduction of more
portable film technologies in the form of 16mm film cameras influenced televi-
sion practices, dramatic content and consequently changed the way that sets could
be designed.
The insights provided by this further exploration of realism in televisual terms
will underpin the differences in the approaches needed to look at television and
film set design in the second half of the book. The chapters in this part of the
book will look at what contributions there have been to understanding set design
and how these contribute to the meaning of film in various ways. It will show
how these approaches can help us to understand the other visual medium of tel-
evision design. Chapter 4 begins by trying to understand what contributions the
8 Introduction
References
Affron, Charles and Affron, Mirella Jona (1995) Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narra-
tive. New York: Rutgers University Press.
Barnwell, Jane (2004) Production Design: Architects of the Screen. London: Wallflower.
Barnwell, Jane (2017) Production Design for Screen:Visual Storytelling in Film and TV. London:
Bloomsbury.
Millerson, Gerald (1997) TV Scenic Design. 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Shorter, Georgina (2012) Designing for the Screen: Production Design and Art Direction
Explained. Marlborough: The Crowood Press.
Street, Sarah (2001) Costume and Cinema: Dress Codes in Popular Cinema. London: Wall-
flower Press.
Tashiro, C.S. (1998) Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film. Austin, TX: Uni-
versity of Texas Press.
Film
Profondo Rosso 1975. Directed by Dario Argento. Italy: Rizzoli Film.
The Thing 1985. Directed by John Carpenter. USA: Universal Pictures.
The Thing 2011. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen. USA: Morgan Creek Entertainment
Group.
The Thing from Another Planet 1951. Directed by Christian Nyby. USA: RKO Pictures.
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