"Grand Hotel" ( Edmund Goulding )

Paper Summary:

"In Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel (1932) the main set, the hotel's lobby, has a circular reception desk at its center. Around the desk Cedric Gibbons designed a bold pattern of alternating black and white squares that resolve into increasingly extended diamonds as the pattern turns into a vortex with the desk as its center.

From the Paper:

"In Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel (1932) the main set, the hotel's lobby, has a circular reception desk at its center. Around the desk Cedric Gibbons designed a bold pattern of alternating black and white squares that resolve into increasingly extended diamonds as the pattern turns into a vortex with the desk as its center. Circular movement around the hub of the desk is the guiding structural principle of the film. This principle literalizes the desk's allegorical standing as the center around which the characters' lives revolve. The film's metaphor of the gigantic urban hotel as a microcosm of life relies on this central point of reference. The Grand Hotel itself is an enclosed world--the scenes are seldom enacted outside it and are always attached its exterior. The building, especially in dramatic process shots of its internal balconies..."

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