Thoughts on Film Set Design
Abstract
Set design, in Wimmer’s view, is the visual background to the action of a drama or film, to which the character in his action gives energy and determines its function. The key elements of this background are: space, its architectural layout, and the objects that fill it. Theatrical space was static. It was Gordon Craig who dynamized it using the play of light. The film uses a dynamic and variable space, but it is not the set design that the viewer is dealing with here, but its photography. Wimmer pays attention to how the viewer perceives the film space by engaging the senses, sensibility, emotions, associations, and the intellect. Wimmer identifies the eye of the viewer with the eye of the camera. The focal point is the protagonist and his actions in the environment that contains much more information (of social and psychological nature) than the background in the theatre. As he states, spatial landscapes and actors come together in the movement of the action by way of harmony or contrast. From this point of view and referring to specific examples, Wimmer analyses such factors as plot, moving image, frame composition, editing, and their relationship to set design and space construction. He invokes Aldous Huxley’s metaphor describing film drama as a wide river full of whirlpools. It is the film space that forms the basis of its continuity. (Non-reviewed material; originally published in Kwartalnik Filmowy 1963, no. 52, pp. 3-15).
Keywords:
set design, architecture, space, film, theatreReferences
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Authors
Marian Wimmerkwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
Poland
Architect, artist, art education organiser, art theorist. He was born in 1897 in Kolomyia (present-day western Ukraine). Wimmer’s father earned a considerable fortune in the construction business and made sure that his children received a thorough education. Marian took his matriculation examinations in Vienna and went on to study architecture at the Lviv Polytechnic and, at the same time, piano at the Music Society. Later, he also took painting and drawing at the Lviv Industrial School. In the mid-1920s, due to the risk of tuberculosis, Wimmer settled with his wife, also an architect, in the city of Zakopane, where he took up design and teaching work. After the war (much of which he spent in Lviv), Wimmer settled permanently in Łódź. He switched from his former activities and took part in the setting up of the Łódź Film School as well as the Textile Design Department at the Academy of Fine Arts. After 1957, probably due to health issues, Wimmer retired from his functions there. Although he did not give up on his participation in the artistic life of the city, he focused primarily on his own academic work. He died in 1970. His unpublished articles were collected in the volume Marian Wimmer. Przestrzeń jako tworzywo sztuki [Marian Wimmer: Space as the Material of Art], published by the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź in 2021.
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