Studios are, at once, material environments and symbolic forms, sites of artistic creation and physical labor, and nodes in networks of resource circulation. They are architectural places that generate virtual spaces—worlds built to build worlds. Yet, despite being icons of corporate identity, studios have faded into the background of critical discourse and into the margins of film and media history. In response, In the Studio demonstrates that when we foreground these worlds, we gain new insights into moving-image culture and the dynamics that quietly mark the worlds on our screens. Spanning the twentieth century and moving globally, this unique collection tells new stories about studio icons—Pinewood, Cinecittà, Churubusco, and CBS—as well as about the experimental workplaces of filmmakers and artists from Aleksandr Medvedkin to Charles and Ray Eames and Hollis Frampton.

About the Author

Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space.

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Acknowledgments

Introduction: Studio Perspectives
Brian R. Jacobson

PART ONE. FORMATIONS

1. “The Longed-For Crystal Palace”: Empire, Modernity, and Nikkatsu Mukojima’s Glass
Studio, 1913–1923
Diane Wei Lewis

2. Regulating Light, Interiors, and the National Image: Electrification
and Studio Space in 1920s Brazil
Rielle Navitski

3. Ephemeral Studios: Exhibiting Televisual Spaces during the
Interwar Years
Anne-Katrin Weber

PART TWO. FOUNDATIONS

4. Estudios Churubusco: A Transnational Studio for a National Industry
Laura Isabel Serna

5. Pinewood Studios, the Independent Frame, and Innovation
Sarah Street

6. Backlots of the World War: Cinecittà, 1942–1950
Noa Steimatsky

PART THREE. ALTERNATIVE ROUTES

7. The Film Train Stops at Mosfilm: Aleksandr Medvedkin and the Operative Film Factory
Robert Bird

8. Postindustrial Studio Lifestyle: The Eameses in the Environment of 901
Justus Nieland

9. The Last Qualitative Scientist: Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab
Jeff Menne

PART FOUR. STUDIO FUTURES

10. Made-for-Broadcast Cities
Lynn Spigel

11. The Nature of the Firm and the Nature of the Farm: Lucasfilm, the Campus, and the
Contract
J. D. Connor

12. “Make It What You Want It to Be”: Logistics, Labor, and Land Financialization via
the Globalized Free Zone Studio
Kay Dickinson

Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Reviews

“Consumers in the 1930s understood the importance of the studio; In the Studio argues that contemporary scholars of film and media studies should follow suit. The volume makes an important contribution to these disciplines, helping to advance a new subfield by showing how an emphasis on the material spaces of production expands or nuances our understanding of cinema and television.”
— The Moving Image

"It is certain that In the Studio’s holistic methodology will provide a blueprint for the still vital research on the material environments that shape our media."
— Screen

"This volume marks out a space that has remained largely obscured, hiding in plain sight, within cinema and media studies. The contributions to this book engage the studio as a physical location and as a conduit for flows of workers, capital, and media technologies. They redirect and energize longstanding questions about media aesthetics and about the geopolitics of screen cultures."—Kaveh Askari, author of Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood

"A major contribution to the recent scholarly interest in the production studio as a neglected subject of film and media studies. It will definitely interest scholars and students not only in film and media studies but also in architectural history, art history, business or industry history, and the history of technology."—Richard Abel, author of Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913-1916

Awards

Limina Award for Best International Film Studies Book 2020 2022, Consulta Universitaria del Cinema
SCMS Best Edited Collection Award 2021 2021, Society for Cinema and Media Studies

About the Book