Tag Archives: Film Authorship

Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film – capsule

C. S. Tashiro’s Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film isn’t really about production design – at least not like some of the other texts I’ve reviewed here. While the term “production design” clearly features in the title, and the monograph … Continue reading

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Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation – capsule review

Mise-en-scène can be a thorny critical area for students and scholars of production design. Nearly seventy years after its deployment by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, the term still carries the baggage of auteurism. Much of the scholarly writing on … Continue reading

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Production Design: Architects of the Screen – capsule review

Jane Barnwell’s Production Design: Architects of the Screen was published by Wallflower in 2004, and it’s a fantastically handy guide for anybody who knows a bit about production design but is ready for a more thorough discussion of the process. Barnwell is … Continue reading

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Production Design Texts: Introduction

As any scholar who writes about production design will tell you, film studies has not traditionally been very enthusiastic in its engagement with the topic of who actually creates the practical images we see on screen – or how they … Continue reading

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Video Essay: Polly Platt – Authorship by Design

As I’ve discussed in detail in earlier blog posts, Polly Platt was a key Hollywood figure for decades. She’s mainly remembered for her production design on a variety of films, in both credited and uncredited roles, between 1968-1987. But she … Continue reading

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The Bad News Bears: Design by Polly Platt

The Bad News Bears (1976) is the second film Polly Platt designed after several years of working solely with Peter Bogdanovich. The film features Walter Matthau as Buttermaker, the coach of a ragtag bunch of foul-mouthed kids playing little league … Continue reading

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#52FilmsByWomen

I recently wrapped up a year-long project of watching 52 films by women directors. 52 Films by Women is the idea of Women in Film, and anybody can take part at any time (in other words, you don’t have to … Continue reading

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Multiple-Authorship

So far, I’ve outlined just a few of the ways that the auteur concept has come to dominate most conceptions of Hollywood filmmaking, whether historical, academic, popular, or otherwise. In doing so, I’ve described the “internal paradoxes and contradictions” of … Continue reading

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The Auteur Paradigm, Part 2

In Part 1 I outlined a few key developments that led – by the late 1960s – to a widespread cultural reimagining of the role of a film director. That entry is not meant to be exhaustive. There are a … Continue reading

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The Auteur Paradigm, part 1

(In this entry, I’m playing around with a few concepts and terms – such as “authorship by ownership” or “the idea of ownership.” I welcome thoughts about these concepts, suggestions for alternate terminology, or references to other texts and writers … Continue reading

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