Set Pieces: Theatrical Space and the Arrangement of Things in Classical Hollywood Cinema

This thesis develops a sustained account of the cinematographic set piece. While the term is ubiquitous in production discourse, it lacks a clear definition and usually names expensive spectacles or displays of performance virtuosity. Here it is redefined as a bracketed, overtly theatrical sequence that foregrounds profilmic sets and rearranges relations between human and nonhuman things. Consequently, the project treats set pieces as object lessons in how cinema gathers, contains, and counts matter. Initially, the thesis elaborates a conceptual vocabulary for set pieces by placing them in tension with mise-en-scène and turning to theories of things, forms, and mathematical set theory. Following Gilles Deleuze’s suggestion in Cinema I: The Movement Image that the frame can be thought of as a set, the thesis distinguishes between ‘integrated’ and ‘distinct’ set pieces before arguing that such sequences italicise the frame’s own setness, inviting a compositional gaze attuned to arrangement rather than narrative. The remaining chapters analyse films from Hollywood’s Golden Age that are located in three theatrical typologies—the courtroom, the department store, and the theatre—to track how set pieces materialise different organising principles: membership, containment, and hierarchy. Close readings of 12 Angry Men (1957), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960), Fritz Lang’s You and Me (1938), and a corpus of Busby Berkeley backstage musicals show how cinematographic sets choreograph which objects and subjects are allowed to matter, and consequently how sets in general underpin legal, commercial, and spectacular regimes. By recovering the historical interplay between studio-era set building and theatrical practices, the thesis demonstrates that classical Hollywood set pieces are not merely spectacular interludes but sites where cinema formally rethinks the relations between people, things, and the infinities implied by their grouping.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Mastrandrea, Matteo

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rhodes, John David

• Architecture
• Film
• Profilmic space
• Scenography
• Set piece
• Set theory
• Mise-en-scène
• Classical Hollywood cinema

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/2e36697c-396e-4de0-8e07-7f10ea188469/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.131741

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/405570