Ripping Open the Set: French Film Design, 1930–1939 by Ben McCann (review)

Set design is an unusually slippery area of study. Simultaneously the fabric and the ephemera of studio filmmaking, the film set sits unstably at the heart of the film project. It is indelibly imprinted as concrete space on both celluloid and our imaginations, while being the most fleeting and functional of cinematic structures: an insubstantial temporary edifice destined to be dispassionately torn down, its parts destroyed or recycled to create new, different, but no less concrete other worlds. Film architecture, unlike other forms of architecture, is disposable, fake; yet is most valued and admired when it passes undetected as such. Set designers, those ‘great make-up artists of reality’ as René Clair called them, are the creators of an art that is hard to grasp, both literally and theoretically (Clair, Préface to Léon Barsacq, Le Décor du film, 1895–1969 (Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1985), p. 7). No wonder they have been so routinely relegated to footnotes in film history. Ben McCann’s book begins to right this wrong: it is a fascinating read, rich in insight into the professional world of the 1930s French studios, and forensic in its attention to the core aesthetics of an era when French cinema’s ‘visual exquisiteness’ (p. 2) was the benchmark for the rest of the world. Taking its title from Georges Sadoul’s statement that the authenticity and immersive quality of 1930s film decor amounted to a ‘ripping open’ of the traditional backdrop model, McCann reveals how French sets developed a quality of ‘atmosphère’ (to quote the legendary Arletty in Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord, 1938) that was entirely novel in its poetic dimension. He astutely maps the evolution of the decade, proposing Sous les Toits de Paris (dir. by René Clair, 1930) and Le Jour se lève (dir. by Carné, 1939) as the two ‘most insistently designed’ films of these years (p. 213), and thus the conceptual and artistic bookends for his study. Two other films are read as the ‘magnetic centres’ (ibid.) of the decade’s output: La Kermesse héroique (dir. by Jacques Feyder, 1935) for its architectural ambition and decorative flamboyance, and Quai des brumes (dir. by Carné, 1938) for its poetic distillation of melancholia. McCann analyses the collaborative relationships that were sustained and refined from one project to another, artistic tandems of directors and designers of whom Eugène Lourié/Jean Renoir, Jacques Krauss/Julien Duvivier, and Alexandre Trauner/Carné are given the most attention. These case studies provide a wealth of evidence of what collaboration meant at the level of the cinematic process: how lighting, framing, and camera movement all contributed to the imagined wholeness envisioned by the designer. The further detailed attention to technical elements (the shooting script, the maquette, the découverte, forced perspective, pictorial importing), and micro-elements (door and window frames, the careful placement of props and foregrounded objects) allows McCann to show how the performative quality of the set was the result of an aggregation of elements and relationships that were unique to the French studios of the era. McCann writes with authority, deftly illuminating the grey areas between the material and the abstract, depth and surface, reality and artifice. This is a superbly researched book that adds a welcome new perspective to scholarship on production design, film history, and the French studios of the 1930s.