constructed for a film were made in Italy; and with
Giovanni Pastrone’s epic Cabiria(1914; no credits
for art director or costume designer), “the con-
structed set emerged completely developed and
demanding to be imitated.”^9 Indeed, it was imitated
in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance(1916), which featured
the first colossal outdoor sets constructed in Holly-
wood. Other directors soon began to commission
elaborate sets constructed as architectural units
out of wood, plaster, and other building materials
or created from drawings that were manipulated
by optical printers to look real. (Today, computers
and computer-generated imagery [CGI] have
replaced optical printers.)
The old Hollywood studios kept back lots full of
classic examples of various types of architecture
that were used again and again, often with new
paint or landscaping to help them meet the
requirements of a new narrative.^10 Today, the Uni-
versal Studios theme park in Hollywood preserves
some of the sets from those lots. Sometimes, how-
ever, filmmakers construct and demolish a set as
quickly as possible to keep the production on sched-
ule. Only those aspects of a set that are necessary
for the benefit of the camera are actually built,
whether to scale (life-size) or in miniature, human-
made or computer-modeled. For example, the exte-
rior front of a house may look complete, with
bushes and flowers, curtains in the windows, and
so on, but there may be no rooms behind that
facade. Constructed on a soundstage—a window-
less, soundproofed, professional shooting environ-
ment that is usually several stories high and can
cover an acre or more of floor space—will be only
the minimum parts of the rooms needed to accom-
modate the actors and the movement of the cam-
era: a corner, perhaps, or three sides.184 CHAPTER 5 MISE-EN-SCÈNE
DVDIn this tutorial, Dave Monahan looks at
setting in classic and contemporary films that
have been influenced by German Expressionism.Movie sets are designed for the benefit of the
cameraWhen a movie scene is shot in a studio (as opposed
to an actual location outside the studio), the crew making a
movie can give us the illusion of a whole room or building
when, in fact, only those aspects of a set that are necessary
for the benefit of the camera are actually built. David
Fincher’s The Social Network(2010; production designer:
Donald Graham Burt) was shot on actual locations in
Massachusetts, Maryland, California, and England as well in
the Hollywood studio of Columbia Pictures. This set was
designed and constructed to be a life-size representation of
the Winklevoss brothers’ dormitory rooms at Harvard, but as
you can see, the principal room is missing its fourth wall, and
lighting equipment is suspended from the ceiling (out of
camera range). The wall with the window on the left clearly
indicates that no shots will be made of the outside of the
building in which this room is supposed to be. The camera is
in the middle foreground, and through careful framing of
each shot, the cinematographer will capture images that
make us think that this is an actual room. But fake as it is,
the designers and decorators were meticulous about little
details, which one of the actors said helped him to better
understand the characters and situation. The DVD release of
The Social Networkincludes a supplementary disc that is, by
comparison with other such bonus features, unusually
thorough in its detailed account of the film’s making.(^9) Affron and Affron, Sets in Motion, p. 12.
(^10) See Stephen Binger, et al., M-G-M: Hollywood’s Greatest Back-
lot(Solana Beach, Calif.: Santa Monica Press, 2011).