Planter le décor

Through the examples of Paris and Marseille, two cities that are highly attractive to cinema, as well as Versailles, Rome, and Los Angeles, the author looks at what is at work between a territory, a city, and the production of a film. Film workers and city workers learn to combine their actions to make the shoot possible for the short period in which films are made. As the locations chosen for filming are appropriated by the crews they become less frozen, circumscribed, and closed to the external gaze. Instead, they open up, become malleable, and are constantly reconfigured over the course of multiple events.

Peppered with testimonies, documents, anecdotes, and glimpses into life on set, this book provides an unusual "backstage tour" of the cinema, through the eyes of a sociologist cinema-lover who has observed dozens of film shoots.