TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The first name is that of the production designer, Jean Rabasse, in sixteenth place after the director, scriptwriter, composer, principal casting person and producers at the fifty-one-second mark, between the director of photography and the costume designer. A minute later comes the decor team for the French section, with a subsection devoted exclusively to the main decor, the interior of the concert hall Chansonia, and then a section focused solely on construction; all this lasts thirty-four seconds. A little more than thirty seconds later appear the final names, those of the members of the Czech crew, for ten seconds in total. The digital graphic designers come in nearly the final minute, once again for a few seconds.

In this film the construction crew consisted of a construction manager, who supervised the construction of the film’s spaces in collaboration with the production designer, who had designed and prepared this stage long before. The scenic carpenters cut up the sheets of plywood which were used for building façades and were put into position with the help of the construction grip and painted or papered by the production painters, painters and paper hangers. The exterior was also set up with the landscapers; this is when the set decorator, with the prop person and the fake elements created by the plasterers, completed the decor by placing different objects in it. Although not every job category is included in this example – in France, the Association des décoratrices et décorateurs de cinéma lists more than thirty professions working together to create a decor – this sample list of credits clearly suggests the chains of cooperation required by the construction of any decor over time (first conception, then construction) and space (part of the decor was in France, the other in Czechia, a country which hosts many historical film shoots, especially because the production costs may be not be as great as they are in France). It also suggests the mixture of technical elements required, from traditional and manual knowledge (painter, carpenter, etc.) to future digital extensions done on a computer. Finally, it suggests a degree of stability in these functions, because apart from the names for digital functions, these terms are already found in the oldest lists of film credits – such as this introduction to the set decorator (or ensemblier in French) produced by the Office national de radiodiffusion-télévision française in 1969.^[1] This is because they have adopted the names found in theatre, architecture and the building trades, from which they for the most part derive.

Throughout the history of cinema, these professions have adapted to different aesthetics (for or against studio work, for or against the painted backdrop), different technical norms (conceal the decor in narrative cinema or put it on display as in certain experimental films) and technical constraints related to the transformation of the materials used: painted backdrops, wooden frames, plaster and plywood, synthetic materials, etc. Digital cameras, especially 4K cameras, which give a much higher quality image, and the use of high frame rate (HFR) shooting speeds, as for the trilogy The Hobbit, affect the choice of materials, as was the case in the 1920s also with the shift from orthochromatic to panchromatic film stock and the change in contrast this brought about. Each era foregrounds certain elements, and the twenty-first century has given rise to ecological awareness in addition to the traditional economic, aesthetic and technological issues within which the production designer and his or her crew must find a balance. In this sense, the Ecoprod practical information sheets invite us to think in terms of an “eco-conception” of decors, from the question of recycled props to those of the source and sustainability of the materials used.^[2] For although it was once tolerated for a film production to leave traces or even refuse behind after a film shoot, as seen in excavations organized on the sites where Peau d’âne (Donkey Skin) was shot,^[3] today it is impossible not to picture the post-shooting period, whether to possibly preserve the decor in order to re-use it, or for heritage reasons, or its destruction. The often large size of film decors is a major obstacle to preserving them, except in the case of rare example of outdoor exhibitions, which impress visitors with the difference between the façade in front and its flat and empty rear. Decor is an art of transformation, in which one must create an image of a building “better than the real thing” out of fake walls and lightweight materials.