Wednesday, May 21, 2008

production design blog-a-thon: day three

Day Three of the Blog-A-Thon gets underway with "I Think We Lost The Horizon," in which Jonathan L. (of Cinema Styles) appreciates Frank Capra's 1937 film, Lost Horizon. Lost Horizon, in Jonathan's estimation, has "[c]razy politics, a disturbing message and beautiful, and I mean beautiful, production design."




I follow up with my second go at it, this time looking at the balance between "beautiful places" and places that are "falling apart" in David Gordon Green's George Washington (see below).



Then we're joined by Anaj, of !anaj, em s'taht, who writes on how the very palette of a film can be oppressive, in her piece on Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem, "Suffocating in 1970's Must and Tapestry."

"Production designer Christian M. Goldbeck," Anaj writes, "sets the scene for a suffocating trip into the 1970s where the brownish colour of wall-to-wall carpeting seems to smother all of Michaela’s hopes and ambitions."




Next, Weeping Sam at The Listening Ear appreciates the "stagy" quality of 2005's Princess Raccoon. "Frontal, artificial, performative," Sam writes in his post, "all the way through."




And, finally, creeping in just a hair before midnight, we have Bob Turnbull of Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind contributing an appreciation of "The Look of The Loved One," Tony Richardson's 1965 film, featuring production design by Rouben Ter-Arutunian. Bob observes the way that, in this film, "the rooms are so stuffed and almost overflowing that they can barely fit the people in":




An excellent day for the Blog-A-Thon! Looking forward to seeing what tomorrow may hold. I'll be in three different major US cities tomorrow, but expect a late update nevertheless.

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