Cinema by Design

Lucy Fischer is Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of eleven books, including Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema and the Female Form (Columbia, 2003); Body Double: The Author Incarnate in the Cinema (2013); and Art Direction and Production Design (2015). She has held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art and The Carnegie Museum of Art.

• Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Art Nouveau and the Age of Attractions 2. Art Nouveau and American Film of the 1920s: Prestige, Class, Fantasy, and the Exotic 3. Architecture and the City: Barcelona, Gaudi, and the Cinematic Imaginary 4. Art Nouveau, Chambers of Horror, and "The Jew in the Text" 5. Art Nouveau, Patrimony, and the Art World Epilogue: The 1960s and the Art Nouveau Revival Notes Index

Cinema by Design uncovers the hitherto marginalized influence of Art Nouveau on cinema and adds to Lucy Fischer's already impressive work on the mutual influence of cinema and the arts. Drawing on key moments in the history of art and architecture, and putting them up against episodes in film and film theory, Fischer shows how Art Nouveau often served a visual style that could be used to convey various associations, not only aesthetic but also political. Cinema by Design is a compelling, erudite account that provides not only a new path into the interweaving of cinema and the arts but also a demonstration of how a cross-media influence functions as a building of film style and meaning. -- Daniel Morgan, University of Chicago Lucy Fischer rescues Art Nouveau from the taint it suffered as excessive, horrific, and degenerate, detailing its unique styles, themes and tropes; its uses of nature; its links to modernism and cinema history, as well as the way it energized new art forms for more than a century. A trove of brilliant interconnections amongst cinema and the arts, Cinema by Design will both entertain and inform. -- E. Ann Kaplan, Stony Brook University A leading scholar in so many fields within cinema and media studies, Lucy Fischer demonstrates and celebrates here-intellectually and passionately-a topic that she owns: the architectural and design world of cinematic art nouveau. -- Timothy Corrigan, coeditor of Essays on the Essay Film Lucy Fischer significantly realigns much of what we know about design in cinema by offering an illuminating account of Art Nouveau as an international style devoted to aesthetic display, visual excess, and sensory gratification. Often considered the first modernist movement, Art Nouveau celebrated natural beauty and sensuality, but did not reject modernity or industry. Instead, as Fischer so persuasively shows, it endeavored to merge industry with art and thus to re-enchant the world by augmenting industrial, scientific reality with beauty, sensuality, mystery, and pleasure. Cinema by Design is a brilliant work of film history. -- Patrice Petro, University of California at Santa Barbara