While it cannot be quantified or otherwise evaluated scientifically, there are differences between the contributions of a production designer and a director with a strong visual sense. To understand why, it is necessary to understand what the two positions have in common and what they do not. After the director, the production designer is the person with the most comprehensive artistic overview of a project. Their functions are so close in pre-production and early production that it is not much of an exaggeration to think of the production designer as a second director.
A successful scenic designer before entering film, production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti rose to prominence on the basis of his collaborations with directors Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci. It was Scarfiotti's first film with Bertolucci, Il Conformista ( The Conformist , 1970), that especially assured his reputation. While not as well known as Bertolucci or cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Scarfiotti is at least as responsible for the influential look and feel of the films they made together.
Although there is a tendency towards the baroque in much of Scarfiotti's work, like that of most production designers it embraces a wide range of styles. Such blatantly stylized and designed environments as those created for Flash Gordon (1980) and Scarface (1983), for example, contrast with the more realistic environments in Morte a Venezia ( Death in Venice , (1971), Daisy Miller (1974) or Ultimo tango a Parigi ( Last Tango in Paris , 1972). His work in The Conformist brings together artifacts, fashions, and architecture from the 1930s that are perfectly believable as everyday objects, but which nonetheless have been carefully selected for their visual distinction. The film has a complex richness, not inherent in any one object, but present in toto . American Gigolo (1980) seduces the viewer into sympathy with an unattractive character by wrapping him in the sexy stylishness of high fashion and self-conscious design. In Death in Venice , the protagonist's loneliness and ill health are made compelling by cushioning him in lush fin-de-sìecle trappings almost suffocating in their rich heaviness. It is impossible to imagine any of these films without their environments, for their spaces and objects are integral to their meaning.
By contrast, Scarfiotti's more obvious designs are less successful. In the quasi-Camp environment of Flash Gordon , for example, one is aware of the intention to produce a comic-book world, but it never comes to life. The fantasy sequences in Cat People (1982) are sketchy and under-realized, as if both director and production designer were not quite certain what the sets were meant to achieve. The over-the-top visuals in Scarface convey nothing more than the effort to be flamboyant.
Scarfiotti's main gift, and probably his greatest influence, was his ability to create highly stylized visual environments that were never completely removed from what seemed at least theoretically possible in the everyday world. His legacy lies in finding that point of equilibrium wherein production design ceases being a passive background and becomes an integral part of a film's meaning without overwhelming it with visual excess, even as it creates a hyper-real sensuality.
Il Conformista ( The Conformist , 1970), Morte a Venezia ( Death in Venice , 1971), Ultimo tango a Parigi ( Last Tango in Paris , 1972), Daisy Miller (1974), American Gigolo (1980, uncredited), Cat People (1982), Scarface (1983, uncredited), The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky ( Il Tè nel deserto , 1990) Toys (1992)
Sklarew, Bruce H. Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor": Multiple Takes . Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998.
Thompson, David. Last Tango in Paris . London: British Film Institute, 1998.
Charles Tashiro
Once production begins, however, the designer's importance diminishes considerably. While designers are likely to remain on payroll through production, and are often asked to perform work during shooting, their creative input at that stage moves from the conceptual to the technical. That is, they are less involved in making artistic choices than in supervising the execution of decisions made earlier. The creative function has shifted from
the design to the photography and staging, to the realms of the director of photography, the actors, and the director. And, of course, the designer is not needed at all in post-production.
However, many directors do not involve themselves in these matters either. This is a significant factor in whether or not the director's work will, in fact, have a strong personal style or will be mainly a record of collaboration. In the latter case, the designer's impact on the film's visual style will be much more apparent as the trace of the primary personality involved in the creation of its visual aspect. Yet even in such cases, it is rare for designers' work to have as distinctive a look as that of visually assertive directors. In other words, when working for a director with a weak visual sense, the resulting images will almost certainly represent the designer's sensibility more than the director's; but that sensibility will be difficult to discern in other films, particularly when the designer works for a strong director, because of the designer's subordinate position. The relative strengths of a designer and a director can be found by looking at the work of famous designer/director pairings, and comparing them to work either partner has performed with others. Such partnerships as Richard MacDonald (1919–1993) and Joseph Losey (1909–1984), Ferdinando Scarfiotti and Bernardo Bertolucci, and Santo Loquasto (b. 1944) and Woody Allen offer object lessons in understanding the contribution of design to cinematic visual style.
The partnership between MacDonald and Losey is one of the most famous, and Losey openly acknowledged the importance of production design to his work. While each was responsible for over thirty feature films, they worked together on nine. MacDonald worked with several other well-known directors, including Ken Russell, Fred Schepisi, and John Schelsinger; Losey worked with at least one other designer, Alexandre Trauner (1906–1993), as well known as MacDonald. There is little in subject matter to tie the late film noir atmosphere of Losey's The Criminal (1960) to the quasi-comic melodrama of The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) and even less to tie either to the theatrical artifice of Galileo (1975) or King and Country (1964). The photographic styles do not help much either, veering between the low-key, chiaroscuoro black-and-white lighting of The Criminal to the bright, colorful, op-art-inspired Modesty Blaise (1966).
Yet all nine films exhibit a similar sensitivity to architecture and its relation to the human form. This in itself is a clue to who was primarily responsible for their look, since the director, not the production designer, would place the actors in a space. Similarly, the nine films Losey and MacDonald made together tend to have few close-ups; scenes often play out in relative long shot, maximizing our perception of the characters in relation to their surroundings. While this sensitivity to architecture and self-conscious positioning of characters in relation to it is a common visual trait in these nine films, the collaborations between Losey and Trauner ( Don Giovanni [1979] and La Truite [1982]) reveal the same fascination with architecture and the human form. There are differences in emphasis in the Losey-Trauner collaborations. Losey's work with Trauner tends to be more decorative, with very lush details filling out the frame. But the angles are just as wide as Losey's work with MacDonald, the compositions just as elaborate and self-conscious.
MacDonald's work with Schlesinger and Schepisi is similar enough in subject to his collaborations with Losey that one might expect similar visual environments. Yet while there is some of the same architectural sophistication in Plenty (1985, which, like Galileo , was based on a play), it is largely absent from The Russia House (1990). Similarly, while The Day of the Locust (1975) exhibits some visual excess similar to Losey's collaborations with Trauner, MacDonald's other collaborations with Schlesinger are marked by a realism that verges on the mundane and invisible. None of the work MacDonald and Schlesinger did together shows that effort to use architecture expressively as in the Losey-MacDonald collaborations.
Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: