ABSTRACT BY REYNOLD REYNOLDS

Visual artist Reynold Reynolds will introduce his mesmerizing creations of ordinary domestic environments as spaces for cataclysmic impact and distortion. How he shifts atmosphere, meaning of these interiors is of great interest and worth thorough discussion.

ABSTRACT BY THOMAS KISSLING

The garden offers an opportunity to capture the world, or parts of it, on a small scale. The forms of representation are diverse. Examples can be found not only in well-known gardens such as Stowe House north of Oxford, but also in the supposedly everyday, such as the imagined workers’ gardens around Paris. Reading these built models requires the viewer’s attention as well as knowledge of the location and specific context. In this way, the different levels of meaning can be identified and the world deciphered as a construct.

ABSTRACT BY GINA DELLAGIACOMA

In my lecture, I look at the cinematic staging and creation of private and domestic spaces in feminist films from Switzerland (1970–95). I am interested in how the filmmakers not only criticised the binary spatial order (‘the private is political’) but also produced a more complex understanding of gendered spaces. I therefore pay particular attention to how kitchens or living rooms also become visible as potential spaces for feminist emancipation and collectivity. In my presentation I consider a range of fictional and semi-fictional films such as Il valore della donna è il suo silenzio (Gertrud Pinkus, 1980) or Noch führen die Wege an der Angst vorbei (Margrit Bürer/Kristin Wirthensohn, 1988). Furthermore, I look beyond the screen and engage with historical sources to reflect on the role of private spaces such as kitchens and living rooms in early feminist filmmakers’ networks and organisations in Switzerland.  

ABSTRACT BY BIRGIT GLOMBITZA & UTE HOLL

This panel investigates the tension between unspectacular everyday production design and its metaphorical mobilisation in cinematic portrayals of dementia.
Drawing on The Father (Florian Zeller, 2020) and Vortex (Gaspar Noé, 2021), two film scholars analyse how ordinary domestic interiors are used to spatialise cognitive decline. Both films are set in familiar apartments that initially appear neutral and psychologically inhabitable. In The Father, subtle spatial shifts and acts of subtraction undermine continuity and orientation; in Vortex, accumulation and clutter materialise memory as an oppressive weight. In both cases, production design operates metaphorically while remaining grounded in realist, everyday environments.

The panel asks whether this metaphorical ambition affects the nonchalant quality of the everyday. Does the mundane remain ordinary once it is made to carry conceptual meaning, or does it become retrospectively legible as design? By addressing this question, the discussion probes the limits of metaphor within realist production design and reflects on the fragile status of the everyday in contemporary cinema.

ABSTRACT BY FABIENNE LIPTAY

The lecture approaches production design of films from a conceptual perspective. How can the “ordinary” and the “mundane” be outlined and distinguished from one another with regard to film history? How do they relate, on the one hand, to what Carlo Ginzburg called the “evidentiary paradigm”, the reading of traces according to which everything is meaningful, even the smallest detail, and, on the other hand, to what Roland Barthes described as the “reality effect,” according to which nothing is meaningful beyond its mere relation to reality? Using works by Omer Fast as examples, the lecture also explores the question of how things and bodies that appear ordinary or mundane relate to one another, and under what conditions they lead a life of their own when we are not watching. 

ABSTRACT BY VOLKER PANTENBURG

 

There are few directors who are as celebrated for their sensitive depictions of the quotidian as the Japanese Ozu Yasujiro (1903 to 1963). Sleeping, getting up and performing the daily morning routines, preparing tea or eating a meal, waiting for the train to commute to the office – in Ozu’s films, these routines are not only elements required to provide a background for narration; they are the very substance of his films, resulting from a unique combination of objects, gestures, and a carefully chosen set of filmic gestures. One is tempted to see a specific filmic grammar at work, but at the same time, Ozu’s practice escapes all attempts at categorization and formalization. 

In my presentation, I want to revisit some of the domestic places and spaces in Ozu’s work and look at their astonishing richness – mundane, but magical, crystal-clear and enigmatic at the same time. The work of film historian Helmut Färber and his detailed studies on Ozu will be my guide. 

ABSTRACT BY JANE BARNWELL

This paper explores the concept of the cinematic home as a designed, narratively active and emotionally expressive space in film and television. Drawing on research from Production Design & The Cinematic Home (2022), it argues that domestic interiors are not neutral backdrops but key storytelling agents through which character, memory, class, gender and psychology are communicated. Foregrounding production design as a narrative discipline, the paper employs Visual Concept Analysis, a methodology that traces the development of visual ideas across script, research, set construction, colour, texture and props, treating design as intentional and concept-driven. Through close textual analysis informed by interviews with production designers, the paper demonstrates how homes on screen externalise interior states and encode social meaning. Particular attention is given to memory, lived-in space and the gendered dynamics of domestic interiors, as well as distinctions between filmic and televisual homes. Ultimately, the paper reframes production design as a core storytelling practice that constructs emotional truth through space. 

ABSTRACT BY LUCY FIFE DONALDSON

In this talk I will situate production designers as a key member of the filmmaking team who is responsible for shaping the material qualities of a film through decisions that compose the specifics of surface, shape and space. The details of such decisions – from the texture of a carpet to the composition of a character’s work space – guide the sensorial relationship between viewer and film; we comprehend the fiction with help from our knowledge of the real world and the nature of the relationship the film asks us to take to it. In tune with the conference’s ‘focal inversion’ to privilege quotidian over spectacular, familiar over extraordinary, the talk will focus on the office as an example of a space that while rich in textures and design details, can easily be overlooked as unremarkable, its bland or institutional surfaces resisting interest and meaning beyond authenticity or continuity with the everyday.   

Moreover, because production designers create a film’s environment both onscreen and offscreen, the talk investigates the significance of their work in shaping others’ contributions in invisible ways. In this sense, I understand the designer’s frame as expanding beyond the film’s frame, one that shapes the work of the actor (on set through their engagement with a built environment which exists in a space that the audience only sees a tiny part of), as well as other crew members, whether designers acknowledge these connections or not (sound designer Cecelia Hall once called production design ‘the map with all the clues’, LoBrutto, Sound-on-Film, 2004).

My case studies, All the President’s Men (Production Designer: George Jenkins, 1976) and The Assistant (Production Designer: Fletcher Chancey, 2019) work in differing scales, constructing office environments which balance authenticity with atmosphere. 

ABSTRACT BY FRANCIS PHEASANT-KELLY

There is a particularly mundane domestic space that is always highly significant in film, the toilet. This space does not appear without good narrative reason. Invariably, cinematic toilets are troublesome spaces, particularly for men, and as places associated with ‘letting go’, they are always liable to loss of control, and therefore to a compromising of masculinity. Consequently, while usually pivotal to the plot, such scenes tend to be sites of horror, disgust and death, and as Ruth Barcan (2005: 8) suggests, are ‘dirty spaces’.
Here, I argue that the cinematic bathroom is a site of abjection. In fact, mainstream American films inevitably feature bathrooms and toilets as sites of extreme violence and bloody death as evidenced, for example, in films as diverse as The Conversation (Coppola, 1974), Crimson Peak (del Toro, 2015), Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) and Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006).  Alternatively, they are spaces of crude comedic rupture as in There’s Something About Mary (Farrelly Brothers, 1998). While the on-screen toilet might be an appropriate location for secret or illicit acts to occur, its appearance has a sordid realism that depletes Hollywood of its glamour. At the same time, spaces associated with the toilet, such as the bath, shower or sewer, may have alternate, if related implications. For instance, in The Shawshank Redemption, the sewer provides a means of escape and enables a reclaiming of identity. Regardless, the space of the cinematic bathroom has abject implications, both in the primary associations with bodily disgust, as in Saltburn (Fennell, 2023) but also in the distinctive narrative events that unfold therein. Engaging with Julia Kristeva’s (1982) theory of the abject, this paper textually analyses key scenes from relevant films to discuss some of those implications. 

ABSTRACT BY BEATRICE SCHULTZ & REINHILD BLASCHKE & SILKE FISCHER

 

We — production designers Reinhild Blaschke, Silke Fischer and Beatrice Schultz — meet in conversation to trace a shared yet largely unspoken practice in German cinema and European co-productions since the early 2000s. Although we did not know each other, we were repeatedly invited by the same auteur filmmakers to build worlds that should not appear built at all: ordinary spaces meant to feel familiar, plausible, almost unnoticed — and yet precisely composed for fiction. 

Our dialogue unfolds around this tension. We speak of authenticity that is constructed, of composition that must conceal itself, of working from scarcity rather than abundance. Is the aesthetic of the unspectacular a consequence of low budgets, or a conscious stance? How do we design rooms in which images can emerge without spectacle? What roles do research, communication, collaboration with directing and cinematography, and the productive potential of chance play in this process? 

Through mutual questioning of our own work, we approach production design as a practice of subtle decisions — where the mundane becomes meaningful, and straw, at times, turns into gold.