The Furniture: Architecture of Anxiety in The Golem

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

 by Daniel Walber

The story goes that Paul Wegener first heard of the Golem while shooting The Student of Prague (1913). Though he was clearly caught by the story, Wegener may also have been entranced by a glimpse of the old Josefov, Prague’s Jewish ghetto. Dating back to the Middle Ages, the neighborhood was almost entirely demolished between 1893 and 1913 to make room for Paris-style boulevards. Inspired, Wegener made two (now-lost) Golem movies during World War One - though not in Prague.

By the time he started on The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), the world had changed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was gone. Prague was the capital of brand-new Czechoslovakia, a Czechoslovak-speaking nation - which would be complicated for its mostly German-speaking Jews. Frankly, Wegener could have set his Golem movie in 1920 if he wanted...

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The Furniture: Shirley and the Haunting of Her Own Grim House

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

by Daniel Walber

“A clean house is evidence of mental inferiority,” snaps Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) from her bed, annoyed by her husband for so many reasons. One of them is Rose (Odessa Young), the young bride that has just arrived to keep an eye on both the housekeeping and Shirley.  And with both husbands at campus most of the day, the two women will be spending a lot of time together in this beigely bewildering, story-haunted house.

After all, any house can be a haunted house. And while director Josephine Decker doesn’t send in any actual ghosts, Shirley is as spooky as much of Jackson’s own fiction...

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The Furniture: On Frida's Mirrors and Diego's Walls

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Nearly 20 years on, Julie Taymor’s Frida remains both breathtaking (those Quay Brothers puppets!) and befuddling (why isn’t it in Spanish?). It holds up better as a visual experiment than as a biopic, despite the richness of Salma Hayek’s performance. Filmmakers have long struggled to bring the lives of visual artists to the screen in dynamic, resonant ways. Some fail.

When Frida does succeed, it’s largely due to its Oscar-nominated team of art director Felipe Fernández del Paso and set decorator Hania Robledo. Their work doesn’t simply represent the art of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but interprets it. By transforming Kahlo’s paintings into the stuff of cinema, they directly engage with their meaning - or, rather, Taymor’s own interpretation of those meanings. The result is a film with a lot to say about materiality and identity, the value of brick and the value of life.

We begin with Frida’s bedridden journey to her first solo show in Mexico City. She is carried out of the house aloft, head resting on an embroidered pillow that reads “Amor” and “Tesoro Mio.” But then we see her through her eyes, as she looks up to the mirror into the canopy of her bed, the flowers reflected back at her.

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The Furniture: Taking Joan of Arc Out of Time

Our Production Design series by the brilliant Daniel Walber is finally back for another season. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail. - Editor

by Daniel Walber

Why make a new movie about Joan of Arc? What hasn’t been said? The first film about her was made in 1898 and there have been dozens since. Some of them are regarded among the best films ever made. Why bother?

A few years ago, Bruno Dumont chose to answer these questions with a heavy metal musical. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017) is thrillingly strange, anointing the dunes of Dumont’s beloved Pas-de-Calais with dancing nuns and sung revelation. The music lends an unearthly gravitas to Joan’s visions, similar to how Breaking the Waves (the opera) presents Bess’s faith in a very different light than Breaking the Waves (the movie). I’d have written about it, but there’s no furniture to speak of - the entire film takes place outdoors.

Not so with the 2019 sequel...

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April Foolish Predix Pt 2: Visuals & Sound

Hello brave readers willing to fantasize about the 93rd annual Academy Awards while the bulk of the internet (but not us!) is convinced they won't exist! We've previously covered potential options for Best Animated Feature so now let's talk all the craft categories before we get to the 'big eight' (Screenplays, Director, Acting, and Picture). It's a wild wild world out there in terms of possibility. We only know:

a) which movies are "definitely*" still planning to open this year
b) the kinds of things Oscar tends to like in a normal year
c) a vague idea and plentiful hunches about which movies are closest to being finished in post-production and will risk opening. 

So please take all of these predictions in the way they are intended: a bit of fantasy escapism based on past punditry experience mixed with vague ideas about what might happen in the future of this tumultuous year. 

VISUAL CATEGORIES
Our favourite film categories to think about apart from Actressing & International Film. Come look at what we think might happen in Costume Design, Cinematography, and more. 

SOUND CATEGORIES
These are much less fact-based. Composers are often the last part of a creative team hired so a lot of upcoming pictures dont have composers announced yet. Especially since Hollywood isn't at work at the moment. So this is wild guesswork. We also dont know which movies will have original songs. So we are blindfolded while looking at these crystal balls. It's quite odd, punditry, in this pandemic world.