Classical Hollywood cinema was a narrative art, a spectacle centered on stars, and an industry producing entertainment for profit. These accounts would be familiar to almost anyone exposed to mainstream…
Archive for March, 2021
Hitchcock’s Closed Systems
Alfred Hitchcock had an odd affection for rear projection, matte paintings, and composite shots—in short, an affection for cinematic artifice.1 In his early version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Gaumont-British,…
Crude Designs for an Oil-Built World
On the morning of November 30, 2015, observant Parisian commuters — yawning at bus stops, crowding onto subway platforms, or walking to their local cafes — could hardly have missed…
Introduction: Design Culture Studies: Between Infrastructure and Image
The essays in this special issue address their reckoning not to designers or designs but to design cultures, that is, to institutionalized and enmeshed modes of designing that sought or…