Studios are, at once, material environments and symbolic forms, sites of artistic creation and physical labor, and nodes in networks of resource circulation. They are architectural places that generate virtual spaces—worlds built to build worlds. Yet, despite being icons of corporate identity, studios have faded into the background of critical discourse and into the margins of film and media history. In response, In the Studio demonstrates that when we foreground these worlds, we gain new insights into moving-image culture and the dynamics that quietly mark the worlds on our screens. Spanning the twentieth century and moving globally, this unique collection tells new stories about studio icons—Pinewood, Cinecittà, Churubusco, and CBS—as well as about the experimental workplaces of filmmakers and artists from Aleksandr Medvedkin to Charles and Ray Eames and Hollis Frampton.
Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space.
"This volume marks out a space that has remained largely obscured, hiding in plain sight, within cinema and media studies. The contributions to this book engage the studio as a physical location and as a conduit for flows of workers, capital, and media technologies. They redirect and energize longstanding questions about media aesthetics and about the geopolitics of screen cultures."—Kaveh Askari, author of Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood
"A major contribution to the recent scholarly interest in the production studio as a neglected subject of film and media studies. It will definitely interest scholars and students not only in film and media studies but also in architectural history, art history, business or industry history, and the history of technology."—Richard Abel, author of Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913-1916
324 pp.6 x 9Illus: 44 b/w illustrations
9780520297609$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jul 2020