'Designing Sets for a Living—Painting Landscapes for the Joy of Living': Warren Newcombe, a Painter in Hollywood

Warren Newcombe was a little-known landscape painter and special effects technician who pioneered the use of the matte shot. Newcombe's innovations in screen landscape design reveal an understanding of spatial verisimilitude as an actively contested terrain during Hollywood's heyday. Newco...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJCMS : Journal of cinema and media studies Vol. 62; no. 1; pp. 108 - 132
Main Author Latsis, Dimitrios
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Michigan Publishing 22.09.2022
University of Michigan Press
Subjects
Biography
Landscape painters
Motion pictures
Newcombe, Warren
Setting and scenery
United States
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Summary:Warren Newcombe was a little-known landscape painter and special effects technician who pioneered the use of the matte shot. Newcombe's innovations in screen landscape design reveal an understanding of spatial verisimilitude as an actively contested terrain during Hollywood's heyday. Newcombe was motivated by a constant experimentation with scenery and the ways that painted landscapes could be deployed in motion pictures for visual and narrative effect. His career as an exhibiting artist on the margins of the film industry provides a rare opportunity to study landscape as a category at the intersection of fine art and its more pragmatic visualizations found in some of the best-known studio features.
ISSN:2578-4900
2578-4919
2578-4919
DOI:10.1353/cj.2022.0065