The Architecture Of Cinematic Spaces

A highly visual, graphic analysis of film in terms of architecture, cinematic spaces and production design. Architectural floor plan drawings are presented alongside short, critical discussions of key twentieth and twenty-first-century films which help the reader to evaluate architectural spaces in film and think about the stories they tell.

Cine-scapes ignites new ways of seeing, thinking and debating the nature of architecture and urban spaces.Drawing on the author's extensive knowledge it: offers insight into architecture and urban debates through the eyes of a practitioner working in the fields of film and architectural design emphasizes how filmic/cinematic tendencies take place or find their way into urban practices can be used as a tool for educators, students and practitioners in architecture and urban design to communicate and discuss design issues with regard to contemporary architecture and cities

New Approaches to Cinematic Space aims to discuss the process of creation of cinematic spaces through moving images and the subsequent interpretation of their purpose and meaning. Throughout seventeen chapters, this edited collection will attempt to identify and interpret the formal strategies used by different filmmakers to depict real or imaginary places and turn them into abstract, conceptual spaces. The contributors to this volume will specifically focus on a series of systems of representation that go beyond the mere visual reproduction of a given location to construct a network of meanings that ultimately shapes our spatial worldview.

Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture provides architects, planners, designer practitioners, politicians and decision makers with a new awareness of the practice of everyday life through the medium of film. This novel approach will also appeal to film scholars and film practitioners with an interest in spatial and architectural issues, as well as researchers from cultural studies in the field of everyday life. The everyday life is one of the hardest things to uncover since by its very nature it remains overlooked and ignored. However, cinema has over the last 120 years represented, interpreted and portrayed hundreds of thousands of everyday life situations taking place in a wide range of dwellings, streets and cities. Film constitutes the most comprehensive lived in building data in existence. Cinema created a comprehensive encyclopedia of architectural spaces and building elements. It has exposed large fragments of our everyday life and everyday environment that this book is aiming to reveal and restitute.

By 1915, Hollywood had become the epicenter of American filmmaking, with studio "dream factories" structuring its vast production. Filmmakers designed Hollywood studios with a distinct artistic and industrial mission in mind, which in turn influenced the form, content, and business of the films that were made and the impressions of the people who viewed them. The first book to retell the history of film studio architecture, Studios Before the System expands the social and cultural footprint of cinema's virtual worlds and their contribution to wider developments in global technology and urban modernism. 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.

Drawing on a broad range of theoretical disciplines - and with case studies of directors such as Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, Claire Denis and Todd Haynes, Amos Gitai, Martin Ritt, John Ford, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine - this book goes beyond the representational approach to the analysis of domestic space in cinema, in order to look at it as a dispositif.

"With the birth of film came the birth of a revolutionary visual language. This new, unique vocabulary - the cut, the fade, the dissolve, the pan, and the new idea of movement - gave not only artists but also architects a completely new way to think about and describe the visual. The Architecture of the Screen examines the relationship between the visual language of film and the onscreen perception of space and architectural design, revealing how film's visual vocabulary influenced architecture in the twentieth century and continues to influence it today. Graham Cairns draws on film reviews, architectural plans, and theoretical texts to illustrate the unusual and fascinating relationship between the worlds of filmmaking and architecture."--Provided by publisher.

An examination of the ways in which architecture and architects are treated on screen and how these depictions filter and shape the ways we understand the built environment. There are essays from contributors from a range of disciplines and interviews of those working behind the scenes.