Screen Interiors: From Country Houses to Cosmic Heterotopias

(Hardback)

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Covering everything from Hollywood films to Soviet cinema, Londons queer spaces to spaceships, horror architecture and action scenes, Screen Interiors presents an array of innovative perspectives on film design. Essays address questions related to interiors and objects in film and television from the early 1900s up until the present day. Authors explore how interior film design can facilitate action and amplify tensions, how rooms are employed as structural devices and how designed spaces can contribute to the construction of identities. Case studies look at disjunctions between interior and exterior design and the inter-relationship of production design and narrative. With a lens on class, sexuality and identity across a range of films including Twilight of a Womans Soul (1913), The Servant (1963), Caravaggio (1986), and Passengers (2016), and illustrated with film stills throughout, Screen Interiors showcases an array of methodological approaches for the study of film and design history.

Reviews

This engaging and highly readable collection is the most comprehensive and scholarly exploration of the subject available, but it reads like a lively conversation among friends. From broad cultural themes to minute details, the essays included here answer myriad questions about how interiors, props, and visual cues shape our reactions to on-screen stories and images. An indispensable resource for anyone who has ever wondered how movies and TV shows are made and why they matter so much to us, this book is both a remarkable achievement and a delight to read. -- Alice Friedman, Glace Slack McNeil Professor of American Art, Wellesley College, USA
Innovative and excitingfascinating topics, new research, wide-ranging approaches, and fresh interpretations, marshalled with sophisticated editorial expertise. Screen Interiors is a much needed cross-disciplinary intervention that stakes out new ground in studies of film, television, and design. -- Catherine Whalen, Associate Professor, American Material Culture Studies, Bard Graduate Center, USA
Screen Interiors is a milestone in the literature on production design for film and television. Exploring how moving-image interiors reveal the inner lives of protagonists, the book offers multiple perspectives on a wide range of genres, countries, and time periods and investigates social themes such as gender, class, and sexuality. The book contributes insightful perspectives on popular films and their makers, while shedding light on productions and people. Equally valuable is the books concise history of production design and its historiography. -- Donald Albrecht, Independent Curator, USA

Author Bio

Pat Kirkham is Professor of Design History at Kingston University, UK, Professor Emerita at the Bard Graduate Centre, USA, and Associate Research Fellow at the Cinema and Television Research History Centre, De Montfort University, UK. Sarah A. Lichtman is Assistant Professor of Design History at Parsons School of Design, USA.