Creating Interior Atmosphere: mise-en-scène and interior design

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 376-379
Author(s):  
David Littlefield

This chapter investigates how the world of ancient Rome is portrayed onscreen in the Spartacus series by assessing the physical sets—including the buildings and cities, interior design, and furniture—as well as the art direction in terms of color and costume design. With productions set in particular periods or places, the physical set and mise-en-scène provide vital clues as to when and where they are conceived as taking place. This chapter thus analyzes the distinctive look of the physical settings of the series, especially the villas and the cities (Capua, Sinuessa, and Rome), arguing that Spartacus offers a vision of a dark and turbulent new Rome that owes as much to contemporary thinking as to its past, both historical and cinematic.


Author(s):  
Justus Nieland

A key figure in the ongoing legacy of modern cinema, David Lynch designs environments for spectators, transporting them to inner worlds built by mood, texture, and uneasy artifice. We enter these famously cinematic interiors to be wrapped in plastic, the fundamental substance of Lynch's work. This volume revels in the weird dynamism of Lynch's plastic worlds. Exploring the range of modern design idioms that inform Lynch's films and signature mise-en-scène, the book argues that plastic is at once a key architectural and interior design dynamic in Lynch's films, an uncertain way of feeling essential to Lynch's art, and the prime matter of Lynch's strange picture of the human organism. The book offers striking new readings of Lynch's major works (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire) and his early experimental films, placing Lynch's experimentalism within the aesthetic traditions of modernism and the avant-garde; the genres of melodrama, film noir, and art cinema; architecture and design history; and contemporary debates about cinematic ontology in the wake of the digital. This inventive study argues that Lynch's plastic concept of life—supplemented by technology, media, and sensuous networks of an electric world—is more alive today than ever.


PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (32) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Goolkasian

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Adams

Despite their peripheral position in the Atlantic slave trade, authors of the late eighteenth-century German states composed a number of dramas that addressed imperialism and slavery. As Sigrid G. Köhler has argued (2018), these authors aimed to exert political leverage by grounding their plays in the international abolitionist debate. This article explores how a body of intellectual texts resonated in August von Kotzebue's bourgeois melodrama Die Negersklaven (1796). In a sentimental preface, he mentions diverse philosophical, historical and political sources that contributed to the dramatic plot and guaranteed his veracity. Looking specifically at the famous Histoire des deux Indes (1770) by Denis Diderot and Guillaume-Thomas F. Raynal, I will examine the ways in which Kotzebue adapted highbrow abolitionist discourses to the stage in order to convery an anti-slavery ideology to the white European middle classes. Kotzebue seems to ground abolitionism in the bourgeois realm by moulding political texts into specific generic templates such as an elaborate mise-en-scène, the separation and reunion of lost lovers, a fraternal conflict, and the representation of suffering victims and a compassionate white hero.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-182
Author(s):  
Karen F. Quandt

Baudelaire refers in his first essay on Théophile Gautier (1859) to the ‘fraîcheurs enchanteresses’ and ‘profondeurs fuyantes’ yielded by the medium of watercolour, which invites a reading of his unearthing of a romantic Gautier as a prescription for the ‘watercolouring’ of his own lyric. If Paris's environment was tinted black as a spiking population and industrial zeal made their marks on the metropolis, Baudelaire's washing over of the urban landscape allowed vivid colours to bleed through the ‘fange’. In his early urban poems from Albertus (1832), Gautier's overall tint of an ethereal atmosphere as well as absorption of chaos and din into a lulling, muted harmony establish the balmy ‘mise en scène’ that Baudelaire produces at the outset of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ (Les Fleurs du mal, 1861). With a reading of Baudelaire's ‘Tableaux parisiens’ as at once a response and departure from Gautier, or a meeting point where nostalgia ironically informs an avant-garde poetics, I show in this paper how Baudelaire's luminescent and fluid traces of color in his urban poems, no matter how washed or pale, vividly resist the inky plumes of the Second Empire.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-37
Author(s):  
I. Naydenova

As a research area, interior design took shape in the 20s of the last century, despite the fact that the practice of decorating living spaces dates back many hundreds of years. However, the "self-sufficiency" of design and its connection with architecture to this day is the subject of scientific discussions of urban specialists, historians, art historians, and anthropologists. The article discusses the leading artistic styles and trends that prevailed in architecture and design from the point of view of their mutual influence on each other. Time frame of the research: from the middle of XIX century to the first half of XX century. As a result of the research of foreign experience in the formation of interior design, the main stages of the movement development and its relationship with architecture in two formations were identified: activities directly dependent on architectural decisions, activities that determine the entire design process to a large extent: from the functional zoning of the premises to the features of the placement of utilities in the building. Entering the information era in art as a whole is characterized by the rejection of slogans that clearly delineate stylistic boundaries and determine the role of a designer in creating the living space. The determining factor influencing the integrity of the building’s appearance in a modern view is the harmony of the facade and the internal content, which was made possible thanks to the equal interaction of the architect and designer, starting from the first half of the 20th century.


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