TEHRAN -- French movie set designer Jean-Pierre Berthomé gave a lecture at Tehran’s House of Cinema on January 15.

Berthomé, who designed sets for several Alfred Hitchcock films, talked about the set he created for the East Berlin museum sequence of Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” (1966).
Since the film was produced in the Cold War era, it was not possible for the crew to shoot the scenes in the museum, so a set was designed for the sequence, he said.
He went on to say that some internal scenes of the museum are a combination of real stock film scenes shot earlier and images from the museum painted on glass.
Set designing is a combination of sound and images, he added.
The set should be convincing, and the sound recording is an important factor for making the set seem real, he explained.
He stated that the audience should recognize the places featured in a film.
The set is not reality but an image, and it only becomes real with the help of the frame of shooting and the actors, he noted.
He also talked about the differences between architecture and cinema and theater set designing.
In the theater and architecture, the set is permanent and does not change like movie sets, he said.
But in cinema, the sets are like the pieces of a puzzle put together, he observed.
He also said that no director wants to use the same set which he used in an earlier film since audiences notice such things.
Cineastes Mohammad Bozorgnia, Azizollah Hamidnejad, Bayram Fazli, Akbar Alami, and Majid Mirfakhraii also attended the lecture.