Speaking About Decor: Is a Good Decor Invisible? - Text 1
Like the “technicians of shadows” who preside over the film set, production designers for the most part speak only to specialized professional publications. Their names, in France and Hollywood alike, are little known to the general public. The fame of Alexandre Trauner, for example, the sole French art director in the Hall of Fame of the Art Director’s Guild, is still an exception, one encouraged by the books about him, his numerous interviews and an exhibition devoted to him at the Cinémathèque française in 1986.[1] Promoting a film is traditionally organized around two cornerstones, directing and distribution, in which technicians do not play a special role, except in atypical projects such as historical reconstructions. In these cases, the “exception which proves the rule,” the decor is visible, and part of the film’s marketing capitalizes on the “exploit” which made it possible to bring the past back to life. This lexical field of excess was used massively in film criticism in the 1920s, a period in which “real decors” and “real exploits” were in fashion, to the great regret of the production designer Lucien Aguettand:
Around 1910, there was a powerful realist movement in search of absolute truth. To create truth, filmmakers at the time did not hesitate to cast a living horse hitched to a cart into the sea from the top of a cliff; to recreate the sinking of the Titanic, they would sink an old tugboat with several hundred extras on board; to shoot the execution of the Duke of Enghien in the same spot where he was executed... These were merely the facile solutions of inadequate people who were unaware of the possibilities offered to them by their profession.[2]
In the United States, the gigantic decor of the eponymous city in Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Baghdad in 1924 was visible from afar; a sign reading “Bagdad” [sic] even towered over the location to explain to passers-by what it was they were seeing in the middle of California. This sign was later camouflaged by decor trick effects which rounded out the final location. This sign was a rare gesture of on-site promotion preparing future viewers for the film’s future “excess.”
