Seeing Film: Mise-en-scène - PDF

Seeing film: mise-en-scène 13 not include some reckoning with the work’s formal dimensions. These visual and auditory repertoires should not be set aside, but, instead, actively explored as devices for the generation of meaning. ‘The meaning of art’, accord...

Seeing film: mise-en-scène 13 not include some reckoning with the work’s formal dimensions. These visual and auditory repertoires should not be set aside, but, instead, actively explored as devices for the generation of meaning. ‘The meaning of art’, according to two Russian critics early in the twentieth century who were as absorbed by cinema as they were by literature, ‘is completely inseparable from all the details of its mate- rial body’ (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1978: 12). Film’s ‘material body’ is thus the subject of this book’s first three chapters. Before turning in Chapters 2 and 3 to editing and soundtrack, we begin with an account of film’s visual properties, grouped together under the French term mise-en-scène. Defining mise-en-scène ‘What is mise-en-scène?’ asks Jacques Rivette, a key member of the New Wave, that group of filmmaker-critics which energised French cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s. ‘My apologies for asking such a hazardous question with neither preparation nor preamble, par- ticularly when I have no intention of answering it. Only, should this question not always inform our deliberations?’ (Hillier, 1985: 134). While Rivette’s disinclination to define mise-en-scène is alarming, he valuably insists here upon the fundamental importance for film studies of engagement with particularities of visual style. What, exactly, is it that we see and give significance to as we watch films? Consider the start of Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999), as a fade-in takes the viewer from a black screen disclosing nothing to a scene abundant in visual information. As the sequence begins, we see a young woman lying on a bed. While this figure remains silent and inert, the spectator begins interpretative work, making provisional assessments of the significance of her location, appear- ance and posture. Lit harshly rather than flatteringly, the woman is without both make-up and stylish clothing, hinting at some disre- gard for normative Western femininity. For the moment, we may be concerned just to register and process this sort of visual detail, utilising the categories of setting, props, costume and lighting. To these critical subdivisions should be added that of acting or perfor- mance, even while the woman lies motionless. However, our eyes may be more mobile and inquisitive still, taking in not merely the 14 Beginning film studies figure on the bed but also the distinctive ways in which shots of her are composed. What are the implications of the camera’s close proximity to her, admitting no other human presence into the visual field? And what seems connoted by the roughened texture of the image itself, shot on grainy video rather than 35mm film? In carrying out interpretative work of this kind on a film’s visual specificities, the spectator is considering mise-en-scène. As Rivette says, however, the term is ‘hazardous’, open to several compet- ing definitions. It translates from French as ‘staging’ or ‘putting into the scene’, indicating its origins in theatre rather than cinema. The theatrical bias of the word is apparent even in the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which offers a primary definition of ‘staging of a play; the scenery and properties of a stage production; the stage setting’, but gives no acknowledgement of the appropriation of mise-en-scène as a term in cinematic analysis. The shadow cast by the theatre extends into film studies itself, where some scholars – notably, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in their influential Film Art: An Introduction – choose to define filmic mise-en-scène exclusively by what it has in common with theatrical staging: setting, props, costume, lighting and acting. Were we to arrest our analysis of American Beauty after considering such visual properties as the abrasive lighting or the woman’s stillness, we would be doing mise-en-scène work of this circumscribed, theatri- cally derived kind. But if the spectator goes on to acknowledge and evaluate other information offered to the eye – the camera’s framing of the woman, say, or the video footage’s imperfect quality – then he or she is pursuing instead that more expansive and satisfactory approach to mise-en-scène which embraces not merely the elements cinema shares with theatre but also visual regimes that are distinc- tive to film as a medium: all those things summarised by John Gibbs as ‘framing, camera movement, the particular lens employed and other photographic decisions’ (2002: 5). This chapter adopts the broader of these two understandings of mise-en-scène. After first discussing the elements that film carries across from theatrical staging, it goes on to consider aspects of cin- ematography. Even such an expansive definition of filmic mise-en- scène is open to dispute as narrow and arbitrary. Jean-Luc Godard, another major figure in the French New Wave, writes with regard Seeing film: mise-en-scène 15 to a particular editing practice that ‘montage is above all an integral part of mise-en-scène’ (Narboni and Milne, 1972: 39). Bernard F. Dick, in a much-used textbook in film studies, suggests somewhat eccentrically that sound, too, should be accounted an element of mise-en-scène (2002: 19). While sound’s contribution to the sum of a film’s meanings is fundamental – in the scene from American Beauty, a man’s voice from off-camera modifies the sense of isola- tion that is visually implied – the proposition which Dick makes is one, for the moment, to resist in the interests of isolating the pecu- liarly visual components of cinema. Similarly, while Godard shows a proper distaste for any approach to film that underplays the effect of combining shots, the approach to mise-en-scène that is elaborated in this chapter still 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 1950s by the French philosopher of aesthetics Etienne Souriau, the term pro-filmic refers to those components of a film’s visual field that are considered to exist prior to and independent of the camera’s activity: namely, the elements of setting, props, costume, lighting and acting (or performance) which cinema shares with forms of staged spectacle such as theatre, opera and dance. The artificiality of separating these things from cinematography is immediately apparent: Jennifer Lawrence’s looks of concern for her endangered sister in The Hunger Games (2012) – instances of performance, therefore pro-filmic – would not signify so vividly were it not for the film’s close-ups and close shots of her (examples of cinematography). Nevertheless, with the proviso that ultimately they will be reintegrated with cinematography itself, we begin here by separately considering film’s pro-filmic strands. Setting Cinematic settings vary in scale from the vertiginous interplan- etary spaces confronting Sandra Bullock at the outset of Gravity (2013; see Figure 2) to the coffin that, patchily illuminated by a cigarette lighter and the glow of his phone, confines the protagonist 16 Beginning film studies 2 Interplanetary space as setting: Sandra Bullock in Gravity (2013) in Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried (2010). In opulence they stretch from the Roman palaces of epics or the sumptuous interiors of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) to the hellish lava- tory that Renton occupies in Trainspotting (1996). While some film settings advertise their artificiality, others, by contrast, evoke what Roland Barthes calls ‘the reality effect’: at one end of the spectrum, the fantastical Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz (1939); at the other, teeming city streets that have been exploited throughout cinema history (from brief ‘actuality’ films made in France by the Lumière brothers during the 1890s, through Italian neo-realism of the 1940s and early 1950s, to instances of modern Latin American cinema such as Amores perros (2000) and City of God (2002)). Whether expansive or narrow, magnificent or squalid, artificial or naturalistic, film settings compel our attention. They are not merely inert containers of or backdrops to action, but are them- selves charged with significance. At the most basic level, locations serve in narrative cinema to reinforce the plausibility of particular kinds of story. An American urban crime drama would be sterile and unconvincing without the run-down street, the neighbourhood diner, the dimly lit bar; similarly, to guarantee the integrity of its fantastical story-world, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3) requires enchanted forests, shimmering lakes and tower- ing precipices. As these brief examples suggest, setting also func- tions as an index of a film’s generic status. Chapter 5 will return to the question of setting’s role in genre classification; for the moment, we simply note that particular spaces have become a­ ssociated with Seeing film: mise-en-scène 17 certain film genres rather than with others. When Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More (1965) opens with an extreme long shot of rocky desert terrain, the spectator can make a reasonable, if still ten- tative assumption that the film is a western (albeit one that proves to have a playful relationship to the western’s conventions as codi- fied by Hollywood). The fact that in this scene we also observe a lone horseman, looking insignificant against immensities of sand and sky, alerts us to another basic function of setting in narra- tive cinema: its revelatory power with respect to character. As well as serving in quite obvious ways to specify the geographical co-ordinates and socio-economic positioning of film protagonists, settings may also work more subtly to evoke their psychological condition. Such symbolic use of space is especially vivid in German Expressionist cinema, which flourished after World War I. To take just one example: when the vampiric protagonist in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is seen in one shot standing behind the latticed window of an apartment block, we learn not just matter-of-factly about his living arrangements, but, more profoundly, of his sense of incarceration by conformist Weimar society. While highly devel- oped spatial symbolism is a signature of this particular cinematic tradition, the spectator should also be sensitive to expressionistic settings elsewhere in film. Props Setting’s functions of substantiating narrative, signalling genre and revealing character are also performed by props: objects of whatever dimensions that appear on screen. Like particular spaces, certain props are correlated with some genres more than with others (again a topic for development in Chapter 5). If a parachute appears on screen, it is a fair bet we are not watching a western (unless of a surreal sort); if a cigarette flares atmospherically into life in close-up, the film noir fan is liable to experience a greater thrill of anticipation than the devotee of epic. And, like settings, props also perform an informational role in narrative cinema with respect to character. Sometimes this function will be limited to confirming socio-economic and occupational status (a reporter’s notebook, a businessman’s briefcase); elsewhere, however, props may take on expressionistic power. When Travis Bickle drops an 18 Beginning film studies Alka-Seltzer into water in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), the fizzing tablet seems not just one tiny component of his mate- rial world but indicative of his synaptic disturbance to the point of explosion (this effect enhanced by use of extreme close-up and non-naturalistic sound). Props – or, speaking less technically, things – have also been at the centre of long-running theoretical debates over film’s realism or otherwise as a medium. For key texts in a broadly realist tradition, including André Bazin’s What Is Cinema? (1958–62) and Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film (first published in 1960), cinema shares with photography a vocation to reveal with heightened vividness the material world that we inhabit. From this perspective, the chief value of showing a cigarette or a parachute is to represent it in all its detailed particularity (a vision which, to be sure, may surpass that of everyday eyesight because of the camera’s capacity for close-up). Yet for writers from other theoretical positions, cinema valuably frees objects like these from their material circumstantiality and instead endows them with other, non-realist potentialities. Luis Buñuel deplores the fact that for Italian neo-realists – favourite filmmakers, not coincidentally, of Bazin and Kracauer – ‘a glass is a glass and nothing more’ (Hammond, 2000: 115). In his 1918 essay ‘On Décor’, the French Surrealist author Louis Aragon positively revels in the elusive and multiple significances of film props: ‘on the screen objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furni- ture or books of cloakroom tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings’ (Hammond, 2000: 52). In thinking about the use of props in film, there is no need to be committed exclusively to either of these opposing perspectives. Depending on context, exactly the same object on screen may be a thing valued for its concrete particularities, or its narrative sugges- tiveness, or its symbolic density. ‘Sometimes’, as Freud is famously said to have remarked, ‘a cigar is just a cigar’; at other times, though, it may be more or other than this (a phallic symbol, most obviously). The television set that figures in Silver Linings Playbook (2012) as an unremarkable detail of a realistically fashioned Middle American home becomes in The Truman Show (1998) an ominous sign of a society of surveillance. Seeing film: mise-en-scène 19 Costume Like setting and props, costume, which also includes make-up and hairstyle, has a wide range of functions and significances. Particular garments index historical period, national origin, class status, sub- group affiliation, gender identity, emotional and psychological con- dition and so on. In addition, costumes on screen may encourage the spectator to make assumptions about a film’s genre. If we see figures wearing space suits, we might reasonably conclude that we have missed the martial arts movie. Similarly, the fact that Bickle in Taxi Driver transgresses norms of costuming – wearing military fatigues incongruous in a contemporary New York setting – suggests that what we are actually watching is a contribution to the sub-genre of the Vietnam War film. Pioneering studies such as Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System (1967) have long habituated us to consider costume as a structured set of signs replete with connotations. Barthes treats each item of clothing as a signifier from which, in quite orderly fashion, particu- lar ‘signifieds’, or meanings, may be read off. To be adequate to the task of assessing costume in film, however, such a semiotic approach needs to be co-ordinated with sensitivity to matters of history and geography. For example, the top hat that signifies a boss’s arrogance and a system of class exploitation in Strike (1924) – a revolutionary Soviet film discussed in Chapter 2 – communicates dandyish light- ness and charisma when it is worn by Fred Astaire in 1930s American musicals. In both these instances, costume combines harmoniously with other pro-filmic elements – first with the boss’s corpulence and huge cigar, second with Astaire’s slimness and lithe movement – so as to reinforce already established meanings. However, there are other cinematic cases where costume is excessive in style or colour, thereby clashing with, rather than simply confirming, other aspects of a film’s visual scheme. Jane Gaines argues that certain 1950s US melodramas exhibit such overdevelopment of what she calls ‘the vestural code’ (from vesture, or ‘garment’). Rather like Buñuel and Aragon speaking about props, Gaines welcomes this heightened visibility of clothing in film, its freeing from the relatively mundane functions of supporting the realism of character and story. In these 1950s examples, extravagant clothing hints at desires not other- wise expressible in a conformist milieu. For Alfred Hitchcock, by 20 Beginning film studies c­ ontrast, such costumes are ‘eye-catchers’ that dangerously distract the spectator from the key task of following narrative line (Gaines, 1991: 203–11). Lighting In his remarks on costume, Hitchcock is worried that a pro-filmic element may become autonomous and draw undue attention to itself. Similar concern has sometimes been expressed by film practi- tioners about the over-promotion of lighting. One technical manual much used by new entrants to the industry states that ‘most skilled lighting is self-effacing. The more subtle the treatment, the more natural or “obvious” it appears to be’ (Millerson, 2013: 236). From this perspective, the ideal film lighting is inconspicuous, contribut- ing significantly to the fashioning of cinematic illusions that absorb the spectator to the point where he or she responds to them as to natural phenomena and fails to recognise their artifice. However, we should resist becoming such critically unaware viewers. Without repressing the pleasure yielded by our vivid sensory investment in the screen, we need also to be attentive to the manifold practices by which this pleasure is generated. These practices include well- established lighting conventions. This is not the place to describe in detail film’s uses of key lighting, fill lighting, backlighting, sidelighting, underlighting and top lighting so as to achieve different patterns of brightness and shadow. Anyone seeking specialised technical knowledge of this kind can readily find it in manuals such as Millerson’s. But it is important to note the distinction between two basic lighting sche- mas in film: high-key (or low-ratio) and low-key (or high-ratio), the latter sometimes called chiaroscuro (a term first applied to Italian Renaissance paintings that included major portions of darkness). High-key describes an even diffusion of lighting across a shot, resulting in low contrast between relatively brighter and darker areas and quite full detailing of what is shown; under a regime of low-key lighting, on the other hand, there is much higher contrast between bright and dark, with less penetrable areas of shadow. If these two lighting types are approached in semiotic fashion as signifying systems, then it might seem as if particular meanings can be straightforwardly attached to each of them. Whereas high- Seeing film: mise-en-scène 21 key lighting tends to evoke a sense of clarity and optimism, low- key lighting, by contrast, may induce feelings of moral ambiguity, anxiety, even terror. Yet, as with the assessment of particular props or costumes, this broad hypothesis needs to be tested in analyses of how exactly lighting functions in specific cases. High-key light- ing could, for example, disperse such brightness across a scene as to become monotonous and oppressive, generating a sense less of well-being than of nausea (again The Truman Show comes to mind). Low-key lighting, similarly, may be nuanced or multiple in its effects. Certainly it evokes foreboding where it is deployed, again in signature fashion, in German Expressionist cinema and then in one of Expressionism’s stylistic descendants: classic Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. Even in a noirish work like The Big Sleep (1946), however, strongly contrasted light and shade connote mystery and romanticism as much as they do exis- tential dread. And when contemporary noir continues to utilise a low-key lighting pattern, the spectator, far from being thrown into metaphysical crisis, may experience instead a pleasurable nostalgia (consider the value of chiaroscuro in such films as Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For (2014)). Acting Lighting is crucially articulated with the final pro-filmic component: acting or performance (the repertoire of on-screen facial expression, body positioning, gesture, movement and speech). After all, an actor’s facial arrangement that is perfectly adequate for romance in condi- tions of abundant, soft fill lighting becomes more suited to horror film if it is underlit instead. There have, in fact, been surprisingly few attempts to theorise acting in cinema (discounting those that collapse it into the phenomenon of ‘the star’ discussed in Chapter 7). Some pioneering statements on this topic position film performance against theatre acting and judge it to be impoverished by comparison. Edgar Morin writes of the film actor’s ‘borderline utility’ in the face of cin- ema’s array of visual and auditory effects (2005: 124). In his impor- tant essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935–39), Walter Benjamin characterises the film actor as an almost ghostly figure, surviving minimally in his or her two-dimensional screen image but deprived of that vivid bodily presence – or ‘aura’, 22 Beginning film studies in Benjamin’s language – which the theatre actor communicates to a live audience. It is only slight compensation that the film indus- try responds to this ‘shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build- up of the “personality” outside the studio’ (Benjamin, 1999: 224). Kracauer, an intellectual descendant of Benjamin, also evokes an existential crisis for the film performer, referring to the ‘decomposi- tion of the actor’s wholeness’, both by different camera positions that fragment the body and by the discontinuous way during shooting in which an actor plays a part (1997: 97). However, there are dangers in assessing film acting by crite- ria developed for the evaluation of theatrical performance. Here a remark by the American actor Fredric March, who worked on both stage and screen from the 1930s, is instructive. Interrupted by his director during the shooting of one film scene, March apolo- gised: ‘Sorry, I did it again. I keep forgetting – this is a movie and I mustn’t act’ (Kracauer, 1997: 94). From one perspective, this may be evidence of a persistent hierarchy of cultural forms: there is a long history, in the United States and elsewhere, of actors noted for careers in theatre disparaging their work in the suppos- edly lesser domain of film. However, March’s comment also hints that film acting has conventions which overlap only partially with those of theatrical performance. In his film version of Coriolanus (2012), for example, Ralph Fiennes utilises close-ups and thus draws on restrained gestures and reduced voice amplification com- pared with when he was trying to reach the dress circle during London stage performances of the same role in 2000. Variously magnified, d ­ istanced or distorted by the camera’s positioning, and further modified during editing, the performance of film actors signifies not less than – but differently from – that of their theatrical counterparts. Assessment of film acting also requires sensitivity to historically and geographically variant performance styles. When a woman in silent film evokes anguish by wringing her hands and violently throwing back her head, a contemporary temptation might be to identify overstated, even ‘bad’ acting (an ‘Oscar Clip’ of the sort lampooned in Wayne’s World (1992)). But it is vital to leave behind such evaluative language and acknowledge instead how gestures of this sort belong to a well-established performance style of the period Seeing film: mise-en-scène 23 that was strongly influenced by conventions of melodrama. Film acting in later periods – including our own – is equally ­codified, even if its relative economy in the deployment of both body and voice may make it more difficult to perceive its conventions. Most recent performance in English-speaking cinema is broadly natural- istic, aiming to align itself not with the artifice of some theatrical modes but with observed human behaviour; nevertheless, actors in this tradition, from Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951; see Figure 3) to Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake (2004) and Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), draw upon a systematised repertoire of expressions, gestures, movements and vocalisations in order to achieve the effect which we are now habitu- ated to think of as ‘truth to life’. Acting in a non-naturalistic mode has not entirely disappeared even from Anglo-American cinema. Think, say, of the more manic performances of Jim Carrey. Or consider Jack Nicholson’s work in The Shining (1980), a performance that disconcerted some ­critics – including Stephen King, author of the film’s source-novel – by seeming histrionic, excessive, a violation of verisimilitude. Rather 3 Naturalistic acting: Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) 24 Beginning film studies than condemning a lapse into implausibility, however, a more interesting option is to consider how Nicholson’s performance style interacts with other elements of mise-en-scène in the film (the acting of Shelley Duvall, say, or the choice of setting, or direc- tor Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographic decisions). Do Nicholson’s heightened gestures and vivid facial tics undermine a prevailing naturalistic effect, or, rather, do they advance tendencies already in the film towards Gothic excess? While many general accounts of mise-en-scène assume that its various elements co-operate to pro- duce a coherent and homogeneous work, it is important to recognise that, sometimes, these features may cut across each other, thereby disrupting the smooth, continuous surface of a film. STOP and THINK Choose a sequence some two or three minutes long from any narrative film. Be as exhaustive as possible in listing the extract’s notable pro-filmic features (leaving to one side for the moment its cinematographic choices). Be unafraid to be inventive, even provocative in suggesting the significances of these pro-filmic items. Although Jonathan Culler overstates the case when saying that ‘interpretation is interesting only when it is extreme’ (Eco et al., 1992: 110), ‘over-reading’ is certainly to be preferred to ‘under-reading’ – in film studies as in Culler’s own discipline of literary criticism. Chapter 7 will consider the ‘commutation test’, a valuable exercise that assesses how the meaning of a particular film would be modified if a different star than the one actually cast played a particular role. In similar vein, replace each pro- filmic item in your selected film sequence with an equivalent (for example, substituting a futon for a four-poster bed or a hoodie for a cardigan). How do these revisions affect judge- ments you had previously made about character, narrative, genre classification, realism, ideology and so on? Mise-en-scène analysis often mimics literary critical modes such as American New Criticism in assuming harmony and continuity among all stylistic elements. Assess whether the pro-filmic components of your sequence are organically Seeing film: mise-en-scène 25 interrelated in this way, thereby affirming the coherence of the film-world. Or do pro-filmic elements jar against each other? Instabilities of this sort may sometimes be attributed to the continuity person’s doziness (Roman gladiators wear- ing watches; jet vapour trails hanging in the sky above nine- teenth-century cowboys): consider, however, whether there may be deliberate disarray among pro-filmic features, and explore the effects of this. Cinematography The spectator has little choice but to witness the pro-filmic f­ eatures itemised above. Unless we are watching through our fingers or from behind a cloth – the latter a viewing practice adopted, in pursuit of novel aesthetic experience, by the Surrealist Man Ray – our eyes cannot avoid falling upon all these components of a film’s visual field. However, spectators vary considerably in the extent to which they also register the numerous cinematographic processes that endow props, costumes and so on – infinite in their possible implications prior to the camera’s activity – with certain meanings rather than others. Acknowledgement of the camera’s material presence may ­initially be alien or disquieting. In mainstream cinema, evidence of the means of image capture itself is generally withheld from the spectator (other than in inadvertent sightings of, say, a camera operator’s shadow). A moment in Mel Brooks’s Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety (1977) is suggestive here. When the camera, prowl- ing towards a window in thriller fashion, goes too far and crashes through the glass, the effect is to make visible technical operations that are usually unadvertised and, as it were, ‘naturalised’ in film. The demystification of the image-making process that this affords may, of course, have been forgotten the next time we encounter a thriller’s tracking shots (given the power of such techniques to enthral). Yet the aim of this part of the chapter is to preserve the self-conscious, High Anxiety moment – though not in killjoy style – and to offer some essential terms for recognising and evaluating cinematographic strategies. ‘Cinematography’ describes the host of decisions taken during