The Hidden Architecture of CinemaScope Set Design

Almost seventy years after the popular success of the CinemaScope film, The Robe, inaugurated the widescreen era, there remains little critical understanding of the design logic of wide format films. Drawing on the evidence gained from an examination of nearly two hundred CinemaScope films, this essay focuses on the earliest of CinemaScope films, How to Marry a Millionaire (completed before The Robe but released after it), to offer a radical re-thinking of how set design is the key to widescreen aesthetics. The essay illustrates how, from the very beginning of CinemaScope production, a pair of grids were used to determine the composition of the frame and placement of actors within it, jobs that were normally ascribed to the director. Thus, far from being mere background, the grid-defined film sets add to the general sense of heightened interconnectedness that, like narrative and plot, satisfy a viewer’s desire for order and coherence

Mysteries of Lisbon: Story and Structure

This essay analyzes the structure of Mysteries of Lisbon by reconstructing its story in chronological sequence and by examining how in place of the single character striving to achieve a goal or solve a puzzle as one would expect to discover at the heart of the typical classical Hollywood film, Mysteries of Lisbon employs an unusual, echoing structure between the film’s two parts that tightly interrelates the actions of multiple characters who appear otherwise to be related merely by apparent coincidence.</p

Studying Early Film History, on Simon Popple and Joe Kember's Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory

Simon Popple and Joe Kember _Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory_ London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004 ISBN 1-903364-58-2 136 pp

Organized Clutter: The Precise Composition of The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

Rather than consider set design in realistic terms as the arrangement of décor in space, this essay examines set design as a two-dimensional construct in which the placement of its elements is guided by a pair of underlying geometric grids. The grids, one of which is based upon rabatment, reveal the previously unnoticed precision of the image’s hidden architecture. Overlaying these grids on a frame from The Diary of Anne Frank demonstrates how the film’s set design determines the image’s composition