Jacobson, Brian R., author.
New York : Columbia University Press, [2015]
Added to CLICnet on 02/19/2016
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Part of the series Film and culture;Film and culture.
Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Introduction: studios and systems — Black boxes and open-air stages: film studio technology and environmental control from the laboratory to the rooftop — Georges Méliès’s glass house : cineplasticity for a human-built world — Dark studios and daylight factories: building cinema in New York City — Studio factories and studio cities: Paris’s cités du cinéma and the inconsistency of modernity — The studio beyond the studio: nature, technology, and location in Southern California — Conclusion: more than dream factories .
- Focusing on six significant early film corporations in the United States and France–the Edison Manufacturing Company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, American Vitagraph, Georges Méliès’s Star Films, Gaumont, and Pathé Frères–as well as smaller producers and film companies, Studios Before the System describes how filmmakers first envisioned the space they needed and then sourced modern materials to create novel film worlds. Artificially reproducing the natural environment, film studios helped usher in the world’s Second Industrial Revolution and what Lewis Mumford would later call the specific art of the machine. From housing workshops for set, prop, and costume design to dressing rooms and writing departments, studio architecture was always present though rarely visible to the average spectator in the twentieth century, providing the scaffolding under which culture, film aesthetics, and our relation to lived space took shape. –Cover.
Subjects:
- Motion picture studios — United States — History — 20th century.
- Motion picture industry — History — 20th century.
Requested by Hanson, J.