Designing Russian cinema: The production artist and the material environment in silent era film

Drawing on archival research and the established literature, Designing Russian Cinema charts the shifting attitudes of critics and set designers, termed here ‘production artists’, toward what constitutes proper set design during the silent era. Initially, this meant painterly inspired and ethnographically correct sets for films about rural life that were thought to reflect the Russian character. By the mid-1910s, these influences waned as set design came to be recognised as an independent art form. In films about urban life, complex spatial compositions became commonplace during this time, and individual designers established long-term working relationships with specific directors. Following the Revolution, set designers sought to envision the ideals and realities of the Soviet way of life in a variety of ways. Andrei Burov’s sets for Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line (1926), for example, present a utopian ideal, while Sergei Kozlovskii’s almost barren interior sets for The Girl with a Hatbox (1927) capture the everyday reality of contemporary living space. Eventually, the set design in such films as Your Acquaintance (1927) and Golden Mountains (1931) start to reflect the psychology of characters. Rees focuses a thematically defined chapter – ‘The Rural Environment’, ‘The Domestic Interior’, ‘The Workplace’ – on each stage in this evolution of set design. An additional chapter, ‘Artistic Arenas’, traces instances of self-referential set designs depicting artistic practice and performance across the entire silent period. An appendix of eight essays by such set designers as Kozlovskii, Burov, Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Iutkevich, along with others, offers readers a direct view of what some key designers themselves thought the function of set design should be. The overall result is a rich, coherent survey of the progress of Russian cinema viewed from the previously under-developed vantage point of those responsible for what the films looked like. Focusing on the work of set designers enables Rees to trace out lines of influence among them. This allows her, for example, to reassess the contemporary praise for the sets that Vasilii Rakhal’s designed for Strike (1925).