The craft’s purpose is to produce an overall pictorial “vision” for films, and in 1924 a group of designers formed the Cinemagundi Club—their skills encompassed set design, painting, decoration, construction, and budgeting. A few years later, in recognition of their contributions to filmmaking, the first Academy Awards for art direction were given, a clear indication of just how essential the oversight of production design had become to the so-called majors. The original essays presented in Art Direction and Production Design trace the trajectory from Thomas Edison’s primitive studio, the Black Maria, to the growth of the Hollywood “studio system,” to the influence of sound, to a discussion of the “auteur theory,” and to contemporary Hollywood in which computer-generated imagery has become common. By 2000, the Society of Motion Picture Art Directors became the Art Directors Guild, emphasizing the significance of the contributions of art direction and production design to filmmaking. 

Art Direction and Production Design is a volume in the Behind the Silver Screen series—other titles in the series include Acting, Animation, Cinematography, Directing, Editing and Special/Visual Effects, Producers, Screenwriting, and Sound. 

In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, Connelly shows that the source of enjoyment of confined spaces lies in the viewer's relationship to excess. 

Cinema of Confinement offers rich insights into the appeal of constricted filmic spaces at a time when one can easily traverse spatial boundaries within the virtual reality of cyberspace.

Darwin Reid Payne’s approach to theatrical design is that of a computer advocate and pioneer. With Computer Scenographics, he ushers in a new generation of scenery design by applying state-of-the-art technology to the traditional methods of scenography. Though not a how-to book, Computer Scenographics is a general introduction to, and an affirmation of, the value of computer graphics for both student and working scenographers.

Payne acknowledges that many scenographers would not want to use computers exclusively in the preparation of their designs. Today’s scenographers continue to value the manual skills of drawing and painting, learned and perfected over time, and would not consider abandoning these skills entirely. And it is unlikely that the most powerful computer or most sophisticated software could ever supplant that intimate interaction of hand and mind provided by traditional tools and materials. Nevertheless, Payne’s utilization of the Virtus Walk-Through computer program to facilitate set design expands the tools of the artist to new dimensions.

Aided by 129 illustrations, Payne addresses four major topics: (1) how computer studios are set up; (2) how computers serve as storage for visual ideas and as conceptual tools; (3) how technical information needed for producing a scenographer’s ideas onstage is created with computers; (4) and how modelmaking has been changed by computer-generated three-dimensional possibilities, especially by the introduction of "virtual reality" onto the computer platform.

European cinema between World Wars I and II was renowned for its remarkable attention to detail and visual effects in set design. Visionary designers such as Vincent Korda and Alfred Junge extended their influence across national film industries in Paris, London, and Berlin, transforming the studio system into one of permeable artistic communities. For the first time, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination provides a comparative study of European film set design in the late 1920s and 1930s.  Based on a wealth of drawings, film stills, and archival documents from the period, this volume illuminates the emerging significance of transnational artistic collaboration in light of developments in Britain, France, and Germany.  A comprehensive analysis of the practices, styles, and function of interwar cinematic production design, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination offers new insight into the period’s remarkable achievements and influence on subsequent generations.

Hitchcock’s People, Places, and Things argues that Alfred Hitchcock was as much a filmmaker of things and places as he was of people. Drawing on the thought of Bruno Latour, John Bruns traces the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents in Hitchcock’s films with the aim of mapping the Hitchcock landscape cognitively, affectively, and politically. Yet this book does not promise that such a map can or will cohere, for Hitchcock was just as adept at misdirection as he was at direction. Bearing this in mind and true to the Hitchcock spirit, Hitchcock’s People, Places, and Things anticipates that people will stumble into the wrong places at the wrong time, places will be made uncanny by things, and things exchanged between people will act as (not-so) secret agents that make up the perilous landscape of Hitchcock’s work.

This book offers new readings of well-known Hitchcock films, including The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, as well as insights into lesser-discussed films such as I Confess and Family Plot. Additional close readings of the original theatrical trailer for Psycho and a Hitchcock-directed episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents expand the Hitchcock landscape beyond conventional critical borders. In tracing the network of relations in Hitchcock’s work, Bruns brings new Hitchcockian tropes to light. For students, scholars, and serious fans, the author promises a thrilling critical navigation of the Hitchcock landscape, with frequent “mental shake-ups” that Hitchcock promised his audience.

In the early days of filmmaking, before many of Hollywood’s elaborate sets and soundstages had been built, it was common for movies to be shot on location. Decades later, Hollywood filmmakers rediscovered the practice of using real locations and documentary footage in their narrative features. Why did this happen? What caused this sudden change?
 
Renowned film scholar R. Barton Palmer answers this question in Shot on Location by exploring the historical, ideological, economic, and technological developments that led Hollywood to head back outside in order to capture footage of real places. His groundbreaking research reveals that wartime newsreels had a massive influence on postwar Hollywood film, although there are key distinctions to be made between these movies and their closest contemporaries, Italian neorealist films. Considering how these practices were used in everything from war movies like Twelve O’Clock High to westerns like The Searchers, Palmer explores how the blurring of the formal boundaries between cinematic journalism and fiction lent a “reality effect” to otherwise implausible stories.
 
Shot on Location describes how the period’s greatest directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Billy Wilder, increasingly moved beyond the confines of the studio. At the same time, the book acknowledges the collaborative nature of moviemaking, identifying key roles that screenwriters, art designers, location scouts, and editors played in incorporating actual geographical locales and social milieus within a fictional framework. Palmer thus offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how Hollywood transformed the way we view real spaces. 

Taking Place argues that the relation between geographical location and the moving image is fundamental and that place grounds our experience of film and media. Its original essays analyze film, television, video, and installation art from diverse national and transnational contexts to rethink both the study of moving images and the theorization of place. Through its unprecedented—and at times even obsessive— attention to actual places, this volume traces the tensions between the global and the local, the universal and the particular, that inhere in contemporary debates on global cinema, television, art, and media.

Contributors: Rosalind Galt, U of Sussex; Frances Guerin, U of Kent; Ji-hoon Kim; Hugh S. Manon, Clark U; Ara Osterweil, McGill U; Brian Price, U of Toronto; Linda Robinson, U of Wisconsin–Whitewater; Michael Siegel; Noa Steimatsky, U of Chicago; Meghan Sutherland, U of Toronto; Mark W. Turner, Kings College London; Aurora Wallace, New York U; Charles Wolfe, U of California, Santa Barbara.