Pretty Pictures : Production Design and the History Film

Any author inevitably encounters the difficulty of deciding whose help to acknowledge, which in turn leads to the question of just what to consider part of the writing process. Since this book presents a significantly revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television's Department of Critical Studies, it makes sense to mention the many people who helped me out during my doctoral work, but I must here restrict my specific thanks only to those directly related to the writing and research. However, as will become clear to anyone who reads what follows, I believe strongly in a synthetic approach to criticism that as much as possible refuses to draw limits around experience in order to privilege one aspect of it over another. It is therefore difficult for me to think of "writing" isolated or different from a range of actions that influence each other. Anyone who has, like Proust's Marcel, allowed sensuous experience to overwhelm reason in a torrent of feeling will know what I mean. Under such circumstances, it is impossible to insist that only those books and the people who helped me retrieve them have contributed toward the final product. With that reservation in mind, I must begin the list with my mother, Charlotte Tashiro. In addition to providing financial support during my days as a Ph.D. candidate, she more importantly started my thoughts about historical representation with the costumes she made for my first "historical" movie back in Falmouth, Massachusetts. It was also she who first made me aware of the sensual qualities of fabric and, by implication, its contribution to the enrichment of life and cinema. In this same regard, I would like to thank all those people, particularly my sister Stephanie, who in the past have served as actors in my film and video projects. Too numerous to list, they each contributed without knowing it to my thoughts about the importance of the human form in relation to visual design. Jumping ahead, I would like to thank Petter Magnus Nordin, Neela Sastry, and Sarma Bala Kameshwara Vrudhula for "conspiring" to send me back to graduate school for a Ph.D. It is a safe bet I would never have done it were it not for their encouragement and goading. I would also like to thank Dorab Patel for much the same involvement, for reading an early revision of the book, and for providing many meals beyond the budget of a starving student. In the same spirit, I would like to thank Scott and Jill Kalter, whose enthusiastic support and weekend retreats in Malibu provided incalculable relief and refreshment from academic doldrums. As for USC, it is difficult to single out fellow students for thanks, since part of the process of graduate education is to test your ideas against the opinions of others. If I mention specific colleagues, such as "Theories of film have traditionally dealt with either narrative or industrial issues, with the consequence that the physical content of the graphic frame has often been ignored or relegated to the sidelines. By contrast, C.S. Tashiro foregrounds the visual aspect of cinema in this book, drawing on his experiences as a designer and filmmaker, as well as on contemporary theory, to show how production design can support or contradict narrative structure, or exist in an entirely parallel realm of meaning." "Tashiro looks at cinematic production design from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing art and architecture theory, audience reception, narrative theory, and phenomenology, to arrive at a more encompassing definition of the process. He builds his argument around studies of several prominent history films, since design is central to historical representation, and explores the most pertinent issues raised by the topic, particularly commodity consumption. In his conclusion, he also offers possible solutions to some of the social problems raised by design."--Jacket Theories of film have traditionally dealt with either narrative or industrial issues, with the consequence that the physical content of the graphic frame has often been ignored or relegated to the sidelines. By contrast, C. S. Tashiro foregrounds the visual aspect of cinema in this book, drawing on his experiences as a designer and filmmaker, as well as on contemporary theory, to show how production design can support or contradict narrative structure, or exist in an entirely parallel realm of meaning. Tashiro looks at cinematic production design from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing art and architecture theory, audience reception, narrative theory, and phenomenology, to arrive at a more encompassing definition of the process. He builds his argument around studies of several prominent history films, since design is central to historical representation, and explores the most pertinent issues raised by the topic, particularly commodity consumption. In his conclusion, he also offers possible solutions to some of the social problems raised by design.