Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History

Lucy Fischer

Published by Columbia University Press 2017

Cinema by Design

Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History

Lucy Fischer

In the series Film and Culture Series

https://doi.org/10.7312/fisc17502

Overview
Contents

About this book

?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'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.

Cinema by Design traces Art Nouveau’s long history in films from various decades and global locales, appreciating the movement’s enduring avant-garde aesthetics. Lucy Fischer explains why an art movement embedded in modernist sensibilities can flourish in contemporary film through its visions of nature, gender, sexuality, and the exotic.

Author / Editor information

Lucy Fischer is Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of eleven books, including Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema and the Female Form (Columbia, 2003); Body Double: The Author Incarnate in the Cinema (2013); and Art Direction and Production Design (2015). She has held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art and The Carnegie Museum of Art.

Reviews

Patrice Petro, University of California at Santa Barbara:
Lucy Fischer significantly realigns much of what we know about design in cinema by offering an illuminating account of Art Nouveau as an international style devoted to aesthetic display, visual excess, and sensory gratification. Often considered the first modernist movement, Art Nouveau celebrated natural beauty and sensuality, but did not reject modernity or industry. Instead, as Fischer so persuasively shows, it endeavored to merge industry with art and thus to re-enchant the world by augmenting industrial, scientific reality with beauty, sensuality, mystery, and pleasure. Cinema by Design is a brilliant work of film history.

Timothy Corrigan, coeditor of Essays on the Essay Film:
A leading scholar in so many fields within cinema and media studies, Lucy Fischer demonstrates and celebrates here—intellectually and passionately—a topic that she owns: the architectural and design world of cinematic art nouveau.

E. Ann Kaplan, Stony Brook University:
Lucy Fischer rescues Art Nouveau from the taint it suffered as excessive, horrific, and degenerate, detailing its unique styles, themes and tropes; its uses of nature; its links to modernism and cinema history, as well as the way it energized new art forms for more than a century. A trove of brilliant interconnections amongst cinema and the arts, Cinema by Design will both entertain and inform.

Daniel Morgan, University of Chicago:
Cinema by Design uncovers the hitherto marginalized influence of Art Nouveau on cinema and adds to Lucy Fischer's already impressive work on the mutual influence of cinema and the arts. Drawing on key moments in the history of art and architecture, and putting them up against episodes in film and film theory, Fischer shows how Art Nouveau often served a visual style that could be used to convey various associations, not only aesthetic but also political. Cinema by Design is a compelling, erudite account that provides not only a new path into the interweaving of cinema and the arts but also a demonstration of how a cross-media influence functions as a building of film style and meaning.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xv
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1. Art Nouveau and the Age of Attractions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
Chapter 2. Art Nouveau and American Film of the 1920s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
Chapter 3. Architecture and the City Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	114
Chapter 4. Art Nouveau, Chambers of Horror, and “The Jew in the Text” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
Chapter 5. Art Nouveau, Patrimony, and the Art World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 288
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 64
- Other: 64 b&w illustrations and 22 color plates

eBook

Published: April 10, 2017
ISBN: 9780231544221