Constructing – and Destroying – a Decor by Order of the Construction Manager - Text 5
To break up a decor, having confirmed that all the necessary shots have been obtained in a given place, can be highly symbolic (putting furniture back in its original place in a rented dwelling and leaving) or literal: the end of the making-of film on Faubourg 36 shows the fairly incredible moment of destruction when, in a few shots/hours, the plywood is pushed to the ground by machines and the lot which had been occupied once again becomes vacant, without any trace of the past weeks, when people walked along the false recreated streets of 1936 Paris. No better example can exist of what André Bazin calls the Nero complex, or “the pleasure experienced at the sight of urban destruction.”[4] To see destroyed instantly the product of the work of hundreds of people, after thousands of hours of work, is at once ridiculous and a sign of the energy and craft needed to put a film together. These images also clearly show the main concern of the production designer, as well as that of every technician working on the film: to create an ephemeral space to be used just once and about which the only thing that counts is the image, whose purpose, for its part, is to remain in the collective imagination.
