Cinema by design : art nouveau, modernism, and film history
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Cinema by design : art nouveau, modernism, and film history
(Film and culture)
Columbia University Press, c2017
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
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  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
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  Gifu
  Shizuoka
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  Kyoto
  Osaka
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  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
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  Tokushima
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  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
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  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
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  United States of America
Note
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Art Nouveau thrived from the late 1890s through the First World War. The international design movement reveled in curvilinear forms and both playful and macabre visions and had a deep impact on cinematic art direction, costuming, gender representation, genre, and theme. Though historians have long dismissed Art Nouveau as a decadent cultural mode, its tremendous afterlife in cinema proves otherwise. In Cinema by Design, Lucy Fischer traces Art Nouveau's long history in films from various decades and global locales, appreciating the movement's enduring avant-garde aesthetics and dynamic ideology. Fischer begins with the portrayal of women and nature in the magical "trick films" of the Spanish director Segundo de Chomon; the elite dress and decor design choices in Cecil B. DeMille's The Affairs of Anatol (1921); and the mise-en-scene of fantasy in Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Reading Salome (1923), Fischer shows how the cinema offered an engaging frame for adapting the risque works of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.
Moving to the modern era, Fischer focuses on a series of dramatic films, including Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), that make creative use of the architecture of Antoni Gaudi; and several European works of horror-The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Deep Red (1975), and The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)-in which Art Nouveau architecture and narrative supply unique resonances in scenes of terror. In later chapters, she examines films like Klimt (2006) that portray the style in relation to the art world and ends by discussing the Art Nouveau revival in 1960s cinema. Fischer's analysis brings into focus the partnership between Art Nouveau's fascination with the illogical and the unconventional and filmmakers' desire to upend viewers' perception of the world. Her work explains why an art movement embedded in modernist sensibilities can flourish in contemporary film through its visions of nature, gender, sexuality, and the exotic.
Table of Contents
Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Art Nouveau and the Age of Attractions 2. Art Nouveau and American Film of the 1920s: Prestige, Class, Fantasy, and the Exotic 3. Architecture and the City: Barcelona, Gaudi, and the Cinematic Imaginary 4. Art Nouveau, Chambers of Horror, and "The Jew in the Text" 5. Art Nouveau, Patrimony, and the Art World Epilogue: The 1960s and the Art Nouveau Revival Notes Index
by "Nielsen BookData"