Description
?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.
About the Author
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
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. -- Daniel Morgan, University of Chicago 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. -- E. Ann Kaplan, Stony Brook University 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. -- Timothy Corrigan, coeditor of Essays on the Essay Film 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. -- Patrice Petro, University of California at Santa Barbara
Awards
Short-listed for Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for Best Moving Image Book 2018.
Book Information
ISBN 9780231175036
Author Lucy Fischer
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press