TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

When filming starts, the construction crew withdraws and the decor crew on set gradually shrinks, occupied with taking down “used up” decors and finishing preparation of upcoming decors. At the same time, the decor is taken over by professionals with different tasks: lights, camera, costumes, hair styling, etc. And also, of course, after the late 1920s, the sound crew. While the sound of doors and chairs posed no problem before then, this aesthetic and technical revolution profoundly changed the nature of decors, which must include in their use sounds compatible with their visual qualities. The comic scene of shooting and then exhibiting a talking film in Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952) sets out the problem clearly: Lina plays with her pearl necklace in amplified sound, prompting worried comments by the producer (“What’s that, the thunderstorm outside? It’s those pearls, Mr. Simpson...”). Similarly, all the schoolroom chairs in Laurent Cantet’s film Entre les murs (2008) were covered with felt to absorb the sounds of untimely grating. These sounds were reincorporated later at opportune moments in the sound editing stage in the film’s post-production.

The technical crew, then, uses the decor according to its own needs: the gaffers position the necessary lighting, whether in studio or in a real setting, while the grips set up, when needed, the rails on which the camera will be placed for tracking shots. This is when the decor takes on meaning: it has not been made to house the residents, but to be adapted fleetingly and transformed into moving images on film stock or hard drive. What the camera sees or does not see of the decor, and in particular of its boundaries, is the focus of the work of these various professionals: the framing, by means of its angles, movements and format, can magnify the space or, on the contrary, reveal its limits, including its spatial limits. A too-wide shot, for example, might reveal the end point of a decor or even the base of the lights, creating a shooting mistake to be filed under the label “goof.”

While anomalies in films (anachronisms, bad continuity matches, technicians visible in the field of view) have been around since the beginning of cinema, the fan communities who track these visible marks have grown considerably with the rise of digital tools and specialized sites (see, for example, Moviemistakes). Decors make up a large part of movie goofs, whether in the case of anachronisms in historical films (the lit torchlight in the Statue of Liberty in 1912 in James Cameron’s Titanic [1998], and, in the same film, an electric fireplace in Kate Winslet’s suite), reflections on reflective surfaces (the boom and the hand of the boom man visible in Luc Besson’s Léon in 1994, the camera in the glass in Jan de Bont’s Speed from the same year), or the props moved inopportunely without being noticed by the prop manager (the opening scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994), or even visibly wrong material (the actors bouncing off mooring posts clearly in foam and not metal in Titanic, or extras making the rubber stalactites quiver in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in 2002).