Understanding Mise-en-Scène in Film

• The meaning of art is inseparable from all the details of its material body
• This texts next three chapters are about films material body then moves onto editing and soundtrack
• Visual properties of film are grouped under the French term mise-en-scène

Defining Mise-en-scène

• According to Jacques Rivette, visual style is fundamentally important for film studies
• In Sam Mendes's American Beauty (1999), the spectator makes assessments of a woman's location, appearance, and posture
• The categories of:
  • Setting
  • Props
  • Costume
  • Lighting
  • Acting/Performance (even while the woman lies motionless
• The spectator considers mise-en-scène when interpreting a film's visual specificities

Elements of Theatre

• Term is hazardous and open to interpretation
• Mise-en-scène is French for staging/putting into the scene
• It originates in theatre
• The Oxford English Dictionary's primary definition of 'staging' lacks concept of cinematic analysis
• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson define filmic mise-en-scène by elements common with staging:
  • Setting
  • Props
  • Costume
  • Lighting
  • Acting
• A more expansive approach to mise-en-scène accounts for cinema-specific visual regimes, summarized as:
  • Framing
  • Camera movement
  • Lens Usage
  • Photographic decisions.
• Film bridges elements from theatrical staging to cinematography
• Jean-Luc Godard writes 'montage is above all an integral part of mise-en-scène'
• Bernard F Dick suggests sound is an element of mise-en-scène
• This chapter finds it valuable to identify visual elements that may be uncovered even in a single shot and thus to reserve until later the discussion of editing

Pro-Filmic Elements Of Mise-en-scène

• Coined in the 1950's by French philosopher Etienne Souriau
• Pro-filmic refers to components of films visual field existing prior to and independent of the camera activity:
  • Setting
  • Props
  • Costume
  • Lighting
  • Performance
• Separating these things from cinematography is difficult

Setting

• Cinematic range in scale
  • Vertiginous interplanetary spaces of Gravity (2013)
  • Confines of a coffin patchily lit in Buried (2010)
• Scale
  • Opulent Roman palaces
  • Sumptuous Wes Anderson interiors in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
  • Hellish lavatory in Trainspotting (1996)
• Some film settings advertise their artificiality
• Some evoke 'the reality effect'
  • The Wizard of Oz (1939) Yellow Brick Road
  • Teeming city streets used throughout cinema history
  • Lumière brothers 'actuality' films in France (1890’s)
  • Italian neo-realism (1940’s and 1950’s)
  • Latin American cinema, Amores perros (2000) and City of God (2002)
• Settings compel attention
• Not inert containers, rather themselves charged with significance, reinforcing plausibility of story
• An American urban crime drama needs a run-down street whereas Lord of the Rings (2001-3) needs enchanted place
• Setting also functions as an index of film genere

Props

• Props substantiate a narrative, signal genre and reveal characte
• Particular spaces correlated with genres
• If a parachute appears, it is probably not a Western
• Cigarette in close-up, film noir
• Props inform narrative with respect to character while confirming socio-economic and occupational status
• Props can take expressive power
• Travis Bickle drops an Alka-Seltzer into water in Taxi Driver (1976), signaling disturbance enhanced by close-up and non-naturalistic sound.
• Props have also been at the centre of debates over films realism
• Andre Bazin's What is Cinema? (1958–62) and Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film (1960), believe cinema shares reveal material with heightened emphasis
• To Italian neo-realists, as Luis Buñuel deplores, a glass is a glass
• Louis Aragon 'On Décor' (1918) revels in props elusive qualities
• Can be valued concretely suggestion or symbolic
• A cigar as Freud remarked, is sometimes just a cigar
• Television set in Silver Linings Playbook (2012) is a detail, but in The Truman Show (1998) represents surveillance

Costume

• Range of functions and significance
• Garments index historical period, national origin, class status subgroup and gender identity
• Can encourage spectators assumptions about a film genre
• Military fatigues in Taxi Driver suggests contribution to Vietnam War film
• Studies suggest viewing costume as signs replete with connotations
• Clothes are signifiers from which meanings can be read off orderly
• Need to coordinate a semiotic approach with history/geography
• Top hat as a boss's arrogance in Strike (1924) vs dandyish lightness if worn by Fred Astaire in 1930s films
• Costume confirms other elements
• Other times contrasts/clashes to signify something different
• Jane Gaines says certain 1950s US melodramas exhibit overdevelopment of the vestural code
• Gaines welcomes clothing film to free from mundane functions

Lighting

• Pro-filmic elements can become autonomous, potentially causing concern
• Self-effacing lighting is more natural/obvious (Millerson, 2013: 236)
• Inconspicuous lighting contributes to the fashioning of cinematic illusions
• Be attentive to the practices by why the pleasure is generated; established lighting conventions
• Two schema in film:
  • High-key (or low-ratio)
  • Low-key (high-ratio), sometimes called chiaroscuro
• High-key is even diffusion, low contrast between relatively brighter and darker areas with full detailing
• Low-key is higher contrast with fewer penetrable shadows
• High key suggests clarity/optimism
• Low key suggests moral ambiguity, anxiety, even terror
• This needs to be tested in individual cases
• High-key can become monotonous and oppressive, nausea, (The Truman Show)
• Even in The Big Sleep (1946) has strong contrast of mystery, romanticism, and existential dread.
• Some contemporary noir uses a less intense low-key lighting
• Some consider the value of chiaroscuro to be plausible nostalgia

Acting

• Linked to pro-filmic component: the repertoire of on-screen expression, body positioning, gesture, movement, and speech
• Few attempts to theorise acting in cinema
• Edgar Morin writes of borderline utility
• Walter Benjamin: film actor as a ghostly figure, deprived of aura which theatre has
• Artificial build ups of personality used to make up for cinema issues
• Kracauer talks about the 'decomposition of the actors wholeness' due to camera positions or acting out of sequence
• Fredric March: 'Sorry, I did it again.I keep forgetting – this is a movie and I mustn't act' (Kracauer, 1997: 94).
• Film acting has different conventions than theatre
• Ralph Fiennes Coriolanus (2012), used close-ups that resulted in restrained voice
• Assessment of acting requires sensitivity of history and geography

Film Acting

• Strongly influenced by the conventions of melodrama in later periods
• Most recent english-speaking cinema is naturalistic
• Non-naturalistic has not disappeared
• Includes manic performances of Jim Carrey
• Or Jack Nicholsons in The Shining (1980)
• More interesting to consider how the film's style interacts with mise-en-scène elements like Duvall's acting or Stanley Kubrick's choices rather than calling it a lapse in plausibility
• It is important to recognise these features may cut across one other thereby disputing the films smooth continuous surface

Considerations For Film Analysis

• Be exhaustive listing profilic features
• Suggest significance of pro-filmic items
• Chapter 7 will consider the commutation test
• Replace each pro-filmic item with an equivalent
• How revisions affect judgements previously made about character, narrative, genre etc
• Analyse whether the pro-filmic components are related in order to affirm coherence or whether they clash

Cinematography

• Spectators witness the pro-filmic features unless watching behind a cloth
• Spectators vary in the extent to which they register processes endowing props costumes etc
• Acknowledgement of the camera's material presence may initially be alien
• High Anxiety (1977) by Mel Brooks demonstrates such disruption
• Describes decisions taken during production