Thereafter, Hollywood has little more than a walk-on part in McCann’s study. His subject is French cinema during a brief but potent time in history and film history, a period framed, you could say, by the advent of talking pictures and the arrival of Nazi troops in Paris. In that decade, between the Great Depression and the Occupation, French cinema underwent some notable transformations. And it is that very ‘quality of reality’ that he focuses on, and the contribution of the figure of the production or set designer during this time.

For McCann, the decade is framed by two movies: Sous les toits de Paris (1930, directed by René Clair and designed by Lazare Meerson) and Le Jour se lève (1939, directed by Marcel Carné and designed by Alexandre Trauner): he describes them as ‘perhaps the two most insistently “designed” films of the decade’. The first, an early sound film, is a musical comedy; the second is the moody, atmospheric tale of a doomed man under siege. McCann withholds, for a time, discussion of the distinctive visual style this decade of French cinema is now remembered for – what is known as ‘poetic realism’. He prefers first to establish the conditions which helped to create it.

At the beginning of the sound era, French cinema was in many ways in an embattled situation: it was under-resourced, and its studios had run into financial difficulties. Yet film-making flourished, and set designers achieved what John W. Martin in The Golden Age of French Cinema, 1929–1939 (1983) described as ‘remarkable effects through a great economy of means’.

McCann traces, early in his book, the technological, industrial, and creative changes that affected the way that films were made. He notes that design has consistently been an undervalued and under-researched aspect of the film-making process, and he provides a useful account of key texts and areas of emphasis in its study.

The role of a designer is defined as the assumption of responsibility for the overall look and visual style of a film, working closely with the director. This task can be divided into different departments and areas of responsibilities, but in France between 1930 and 1939 it tended to be the domain of a single figure. There was not a hierarchical, top-down model, as there was in Hollywood.

Many of the designers were expatriate Russians, among them Eugène Lourié, Lazare Meerson, and Georges Wakhévitch. One of the most significant figures was the Hungarian-born Alexandre Trauner, who arrived in Paris in 1929 and established a career that lasted for more than half a century. His work with Marcel Carné included some of the legendary films at the end of the 1930s, such as Le Quai des brumes (1938), Hôtel du Nord (1938), and Le Jour se lève. Trauner later went to America, where he became closely associated with several film-makers, notably Billy Wilder (Trauner shared an Oscar with Edward G. Boyle for his wonderful work on Wilder’s The Apartment [1960]) and Joseph Losey. In Ripping Open the Set, he is a crucial figure in the development of poetic realism, a tendency in cinema that combines a strong visual style with an atmospheric milieu. The settings are not lavish or extravagant; it is a different kind of aesthetic from the look more readily identified with the German or American studios of the time.

In France in the 1930s there was an interest in democratic narratives, in populist stories from a particular milieu. Studio-based design allowed film-makers to create sets that had a realistic feel, yet allowed for a lyrical, poetic exploration of character and situation. In a film such as Le Jour se lève, Trauner’s sets expressed, literally and metaphorically, the dilemma of the central figure, played by Jean Gabin – a talismanicactor in poetic realist cinema.

McCann amplifies his points with concrete examples drawn from a range of films, as well as a series of more detailed case studies. There are a few stills reproduced in the book, small photographs that do not really do the images justice. But McCann’s characterisations and descriptions are vivid, clear, and evocative, and carry a pictorial weight. His study is valuable both for its specific considerations of films and designers, and for the broader questions it provokes about the role of production design in the film-making process.