Conceiving a Decor, from the Chef décorateur to the Production Designer - Text 2
From cinema’s beginnings until today, models have changed constantly, like the work of production designers. The latter of course has evolved as the technology for recording or disseminating sounds and moving images has ceaselessly changed. This work also draws on the increasingly frequent international cultural exchanges between professionals. Accordingly, these changes have influenced what production designers have been called, because today they can be called with equal correctness production designers, set decorators or concept artists. But has the position or role of the production designer in creating a film also changed? This is the question which will be answered here, by studying the profiles of production designers in documents preserved at the Cinémathèque française.
For Lucien Aguettand (1901-1989), who was a set decorator from the 1920s to the 1960s, film decor is the representation of the “psychology of places,”[2] or the tangible manifestation of the ideas and feelings expressed in each scene. The inheritor of the knowledge of his mentors, such as Robert Mallet-Stevens and Auguste Perret, Aguettand specialized in architecture.
