Film Studios in Britain, France, Germany and Italy: Architecture, Innovation, Labour, Politics, 1930-60

(Hardback)

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This open access book investigates film studios in Britain, France, Germany and Italy between the 1930s and 1960s. During this time, studios faces unprecedented challenges including wartime disruptions, post-war fragmentation, movement of labour and the introduction of new technologies.

While the study of film studios has been dominated by the centralized Hollywood studio system, the authors present new research about the often very different histories of Europes film studios, comparing their geographic locations, architectures and infrastructural development. They explore a number of well-known studios including Pinewood, Joinville, Babelsberg and Cinecitt, as well as lesser-known production sites such as Manchester, Victorine, post-war West German studios and Tirrenia as diverse creative and economic infrastructures.

Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, photographs, films, aerial maps and visualizations, the book charts how artistic practices responded to transnational flows in film studio expertise, as studios constituted formative, materially based spaces of the imagination that produced some of cinemas most influential films. How studios worked in the past as dynamic, creative working environments that were profoundly influenced by their locations, architectures and personnel, is foregrounded as the authors produce new understandings of how the collaborative and material environments of studio spaces and technologies shaped film production and cultures.

The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.

Author Bio

Sarah Street is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol, UK. Her publications include British National Cinema (1997), British Cinema in Documents (2000), Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-1955 (British Film Institute, 2012) and Deborah Kerr (British Film Institute, 2018). She is the co-author of Cinema and State: the Film Industry and the British Government 1927-84 (British Film Institute, 1985) and Colour Films in Britain: The Eastmancolor Revolution (British Film Institute, 2021). She has also co-edited Moving Performance: British Stage and Screen, 1890s-1920s (2000, with Linda Fitzsimmons) and European Cinema: an Introduction (2000, with Jill Forbes). She is an editor of the Journal of British Cinema and of Screen.