Thoughts on Film Set Design
Thoughts on Film Set Design

Summary/Abstract: Set design, in Wimmer’s view, is the visual background to the action of a drama or film, to which the character in his action gives energy and determines its function. The keyelements of this background are: space, its architecturallayout, and the objects that fill it. Theatrical space was sta-tic. It was Gordon Craig who dynamized it using the play oflight. The film uses a dynamic and variable space, but it isnot the set design that the viewer is dealing with here, butits photography. Wimmer pays attention to how the viewerperceives the film space by engaging the senses, sensibility,emotions, associations, and the intellect. Wimmer identi-fies the eye of the viewer with the eye of the camera. Thefocal point is the protagonist and his actions in the envi-ronment that contains much more information (of socialand psychological nature) than the background in the the-atre. As he states, spatial landscapes and actors come to-gether in the movement of the action by way of harmony orcontrast. From this point of view and referring to specificexamples, Wimmer analyses such factors as plot, movingimage, frame composition, editing, and their relationshipto set design and space construction. He invokes AldousHuxley’s metaphor describing film drama as a wide riverfull of whirlpools. It is the film space that forms the basisof its continuity. (Non-reviewed material; originally pub-lished in Kwartalnik Filmowy 1963, no. 52, pp. 3-15).

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