TY - JOUR
AU - Roberts, Steven
AB - In the Studio takes a wide-ranging materialist approach to production environments for the moving image and related visual media. Editor Brian R. Jacobson and 12 experts enable an international comparison of studio design, infrastructure, technology, staffing and discourse spanning a little over the last century. Although they are chronologically ordered, the book’s four sections on studios’ formations, foundations, alternative routes and futures shift to different times and places via individual chapters. The first of these, by Diane Wei Lewis, discusses a kitsch Asakusa film studio which reinvented London’s Crystal Palace of 1851 for early 20th-century Japan. It is happily emblematic of this volume’s scope. The studio has long been a locus for innovative scholarship within film studies. In the 1970s and 1980s, several Screen articles evaluated individual studio practices and house styles, in contradistinction to contemporaneous auteurism and film theory approaches. Janet Staiger’s The Studio System, which reproduced two such essays from Screen, put production activity in a sociological frame when reception studies appeared to be in the vanguard.1 Jacobson’s Introduction acknowledges the New Film History, though the ensuing methodology transcends textual and social accounts of studio filmmaking. In the Studio directly benefits from the materialist turn in infrastructure studies and media archaeology, also bearing traces of the latter’s historiographic elasticity. Contributors work spatially outwards, going from production cultures and facilities to their resource networks and global histories, and thereby surpass output-centric accounts of media production. The scholarship is consequently rescaled to chart creativity ‘in and around’ the studio (p. 168), as Justus Nieland characterizes the Eames Office’s network in a wonderful chapter on mid-century American furniture design, filmmaking and photography. The book’s resultant interdisciplinarity represents a significant advance for production studies. Studios offer material and heuristic devices for exploring alternative media histories. Studio scholarship shares with micro-histories of technological formats, exhibition events and star personas the challenge of researching the broad cultural significance of that which may be specialized, localized or idiosyncratic. Representative chapters are provided by Anne-Katrin Weber and Sarah Street, which, to paraphrase the latter, contextualize incremental invention at television exhibitions and Pinewood Studios, respectively. By synthesising evidence from craft journals, production records, oral history accounts and economic reports, they support Jacobson in his argument that ‘studio histories encourage us to reach beyond traditional methods, often using nontraditional archives, and thereby to open new epistemological routes’ (p. 13). We should add to this list the digital humanities, including online libraries of technical publications, GIS mapping and the virtual reality tools increasingly used by comparative research projects such as STUDIOTEC (for which Street is principal investigator).2 Many of the book’s case studies expand on the transatlantic parameters of Jacobson’s important monograph on space in early cinema, Studios Before the System.3 Classical Hollywood cinema features throughout, as its technical ideals were negotiated by studio practitioners in the USA, Britain, Japan, Brazil and Mexico. Instructive work by Rielle Navitski and Laura Isabel Serna shows that Latin American studios proximal to Hollywood are, counterintuitively, well situated to challenge centre–periphery models of historical change. Navitski examines Brazil’s fanatical and promethean-like discourse around Hollywood-style electrified studios that mortally threatened existing methods. In real terms, 1920s Brazil kept many of its local production constraints that are argued to prefigure Cinema Novo. In different ways, Lewis, Navitski and Serna (the latter writing on Estudios Churubusco) productively consider films’ cultural politics in isolation from emergent studio designs. Architecture can possess its own story and attendant discourses that transcend national boundaries and stimulate our curiosity. Studio environments have offered prime symbols of creativity, or one might say ‘productivity’ in certain political contexts. Jacobson’s opening prompt to consider how our modest office or library might relate to studio conditions reminded me of Alain de Botton’s disarming style in The Architecture of Happiness. Many studio designers would vehemently support de Botton’s suggestion that it is ‘architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be’,4 token examples of which might be found in our preferred work settings. Pursuing a kind of studio-based history of ideas, Robert Bird explores how Aleksandr Medvedkin’s film train recorded and screened ‘hot spots’ of socialist construction on location in 1930s Soviet Russia, thus facilitating a collaborative and operative realism. Roughly synchronously in the USA, modern broadcast cities were constructed by NBC and CBS to communicate radially with the nation; their genealogy is traced by Lynn Spigel to the urban utopias of Le Corbusier and Hugh Ferris. Such dynamic studios of the 20th century were widely visible, and even caricatured, in Medvedkin’s case, but what about today’s production powerhouses? Spigel notes that in the digital age, defunct broadcast cities can create discreet rents for global media giants whose virtual reputation precedes their kerbside appeal. Here is the new non-style of functionality. Amazon, Netflix and their peers maintain visually impressive headquarters, with the latter even emulating the Spanish Revival dressings of a Hollywood major. But these organizations opt to conceal many of their multi-sited and myriad services. Digital technology has, of course, played an infrastructural role in diffusing media creation outside the studio. This is incisively foreshadowed by Jeff Menne’s chapter on the Digital Arts Lab in the Center for Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, which Hollis Frampton co-founded in 1973. For all their interest in material factors, contributors remain conscious of the human and ecological implications, particularly in relation to large-scale media facilities. Noa Steimatsky maps an ‘intricate psychogeography’ (p. 123) involving the prisoners and refugees who were tucked away in the backlot of Rome’s Cinecittà, and racially stereotyped when asked to appear in film backgrounds. It is a stark chapter in the history of 1940s film studios, strengthening the book’s revisionist strain. More recently, the Anthropocene features prominently, if not centrally, in J. D. Conor’s critique of the pastoral ideal surrounding Skywalker Ranch, and Kay Dickinson’s analysis of Dubai’s global reinvestment of oil money in real estate. Both are erudite chapters that also question increasingly pervasive and precarious contracting methods. This book’s illumination of studio worlds, through argumentation and generous illustration, impinges on media production’s hidden costs. Will further academic studies of production, such as that which produced the British Film Institute’s ‘Green Matters’ report,5 help to cultivate more sustainable studios and work conditions? How far are contemporary trends embedded in studio histories? Which overlooked nodes of production activity might adjust our view of these creative networks? Whatever the answers, it is certain that In the Studio’s holistic methodology will provide a blueprint for the still vital research on the material environments that shape our media. Footnotes 1 Janet Staiger, The Studio System (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Closely related articles about studios and authorship by Charles Barr, Edward Buscombe, John Ellis, Douglas Gomery and Paul Kerr were published in Screen between 1974 and 1983. 2 STUDIOTEC research project, <https://studiotec.info/> accessed 1 May 2021. 3 Brian R. Jacobson, Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015). 4 Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006), p. 13. 5 British Film Institute sustainability reports, <https://www.bfi.org.uk/strategy-policy/policy-statements/sustainability> accessed 1 May 2021. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Brian R. Jacobson (ed.), In the Studio: Visual Creation and its Material Environments
JO - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjab045
DA - 2021-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/brian-r-jacobson-ed-in-the-studio-visual-creation-and-its-material-XPCYglTttg
SP - 430
EP - 432
VL - 62
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -