Seeing Film: Mise-en-Scène PDF - Film Studies

1 Seeing film: mise-en-scène In starting to think about film’s distinctiveness as a medium, it might seem perverse to take instruction from study of another art form. However, the American New Critics, influential in mid-­twentieth- century literary scholarship, are valuable to us in identifying a...

1 Seeing film: mise-en-scène In starting to think about film’s distinctiveness as a medium, it might seem perverse to take instruction from study of another art form. However, the American New Critics, influential in mid-­twentieth- century literary scholarship, are valuable to us in identifying a sin they call ‘heresy of paraphrase’. New Critics have in mind here readings of a piece of poetry or prose which attempt prematurely to say what it means and show, by contrast, little interest in or even knowledge of precisely how it means. Thus the paraphrasing heretic asserts what a Shakespeare sonnet is expressing about true love, but fails to consider how the poem’s thematic implications only emerge through its complex work of versification, rhyme, metaphor and syntax. The result is a disembodied kind of literary criticism, curi- ously inattentive to the specificities and textures of its own object of study. Much of the discussion of film with which we are most familiar is weakened by similar insensitivity towards the particularities of the medium itself. The reader of newspaper film reviews and the viewer of TV programmes on cinema tend to encounter, precisely, heresies of paraphrase. Such discourse typically summarises a film’s narrative turns, or discusses its characters, but leaves unaddressed its material distinctiveness: its modes of cinematography, say, or its key editing choices, or its layerings of sound. Yet to be concerned with such issues of cinematic form is not indulgent, or somehow minor in relation to more essential things we should be doing as students of film. On the contrary, any attempt to ask larger cul- tural or ideological questions about a film is inadequate if it does 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 26 Beginning film studies the recording and processing of the film image (whether that image is imprinted on celluloid or encrypted in digital videotape). Some of these technical options are relatively distinct from those bound up with the functioning of the camera itself. Filmmakers may, to begin with, choose between different types of film stock that generate images of strikingly contrasting kinds. The director and cinematographer of Three Kings (1999), set during the First Gulf War, selected a stock more customarily used in still cameras so as to yield bizarre, highly saturated colours for a sequence showing the protagonists’ hallucinatory journey through alien Iraqi desert. However, another section of the film – where visual approximation of war documentary footage was wanted – exemplifies the many laboratory (or, latterly, computer) manipulations that are available during post-production. This time the effect was created by ‘bleach bypass’ (omitting bleach during developing so as to give an antique silver tint to the image). Without discounting the creative importance of such decisions taken either side of filming, we concentrate in this section on major properties and operations of the camera itself. As Aldous Huxley, English novelist and occasional Hollywood screenwriter, remarked in 1926: ‘A good subject to talk about, cinematography’ (Clark, 1987: 17). Distance With exceptions such as wildlife documentaries and abstract experi- ments, film tends to be a human-centred medium; it is unsurprising, therefore, that camera distances are generally tabulated according to the relative smallness or largeness of the human figure as it appears on screen. The most distant perspective – common in westerns, say, but rare in romcoms – is afforded by the extreme long shot, in which the figure is barely visible in an overpowering setting (hence the industry’s alternative term, ‘the geography shot’). Background is still significant in the long shot (or full shot), also, although here the figure is close enough to allow the spectator to make confident judgements about its identity. From this point on, however, shots do not disclose the entire human body, but cut it instead into suc- cessively smaller portions: the medium long shot frames the subject from below the knee upwards; the medium shot from the waist up; Seeing film: mise-en-scène 27 the medium close-up from roughly chest height; while the close-up isolates the head and perhaps neck. Finally, the camera is most intimate (or intrusive) in the extreme close-up, which breaks up the unity of the face by showing only particular features such as the eyes or mouth. This terminology has been subject to historical adjustment. David Bordwell notes that ‘close-up’ – a term entering English around 1912 – originally referred to a shot which included a sig- nificant amount of background, rather than, as now, one tending to focus upon the human face in isolation (1997: 122–4). To point this out is not, for Bordwell, mere semantic quibbling, since grasping the precise definition of shot-types in particular periods allows the scholar to make more informed assessments of the evolution of film style. It is also important that we offer specific and nuanced – rather than absolute – judgements on the significance of various shot dis- tances. Here brief discussion of a single example – the extreme close-up – may be helpful. One practical guide to cinematography asserts that this shot ‘lacks dignity’; it ‘makes nearly any subject sinister, aggressive and nasty’, and therefore should not be used in narrative film but restricted instead to such specialised forms as medical documentary (Thompson, 1998: 84). Leaving to one side the dubious proposition that cinema should always aim to confer ‘dignity’ upon its subjects – what about satirical or polemical films? – Thompson also unduly narrows here the semantic range of the extreme close-up. A shot of a character’s eyes may evoke grief or love or religious fervour as easily as it does brutishness. Even where the extreme close-up is used on morally questionable figures, its effects can vary. When the film noir Force of Evil (1948) cuts from a close-up of a telephone now understood as bugged by the police to an extreme close-up of the criminal protagonist’s eyes, the result is a more striking repre- sentation of panic than would be achieved by a more discreet camera distance. Yet when eyes appear in extreme close-up in the climactic gunfight of Leone’s ‘spaghetti’ western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), the shot is no longer principally informative about character (though it does disclose the relative coolness of the three protagonists); rather, as shown in Figure 4, the extreme close-up has become playful, even exuberant, one of many tactics utilised 28 Beginning film studies 4 Extreme close-up: Clint Eastwood’s eyes in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) by the director in his reworking of the scenic choreography of the western. Similar shot distances may thus signify very differently according to the particular contexts in which they are utilised. Height, angle and level The first of these categories refers to the degree of elevation in the camera’s positioning. As with disparate meanings of the same shot distance, variable effects can be generated by a seemingly identi- cal choice of camera height. In Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), for example, placing the camera strikingly low during one early interior scene amounts to a critique of postwar American suburbia by suggesting, depressingly, that a dull-coloured carpet stretches to infinity. In the Henry James adaptation What Maisie Knew (2013), however, the camera’s low positioning is more sus- tained and functions to approximate the perspective on the world of its child protagonist (this option sometimes results in adults’ heads being cropped, further emphasising the partiality of Maisie’s knowledge of events occurring around her). With respect to camera angle, three basic options are available: high angle, straight-on angle and low angle. If the straight-on angle is presented as neutral and devoid of emphasis, the other two permu- tations have often been correlated with specific meanings: broadly speaking, the high angle shot from above is taken to diminish the power of its subject, and the low angle shot from below, conversely, to enhance it. Yet, as with camera distances, such claims about Seeing film: mise-en-scène 29 the fixed significance of types of camera angle are suspect. Again, our reading of particular film sequences needs to be contextually sensitive: after all, low angle shots of a baby held up in the air by its parent scarcely impress as an image of power. Barthes argues similarly that ‘the analogical relationship between “high angle shot” and “domination” strikes us as naïve’ (Hillier, 1986: 279). Evidence for the greater semantic range of high angles can be found in the credits sequence of the Blaxploitation film Shaft (1971). When the camera zooms out from above its African American protagonist as he crosses a busy Manhattan street, he might be expected to appear ever more vulnerable, an insignificant figure in the metropolis; how- ever, the use of high angle allows us better to recognise the cool with which he weaves through traffic – an early judgement about his mastery of urban space that is quickly confirmed as the film cuts to a straight-on, much closer shot of him giving an irate white motorist the finger. As with angle, the spectator tends to become aware of level in cinematic framing only when there is significant variation from the norm. While the frame is generally balanced in mainstream cinema, filmmakers can alter it from the horizontal so as to produce a canted shot (sometimes referred to as an ‘oblique shot’ or ‘Dutch angle’). A signature use of this technique occurs in The Third Man (1949), where a gathering sense of crisis in a noirish postwar Vienna is visu- ally marked by canted shots that increase in obliqueness during the film (see Figure 5). However, the device survives into contemporary cinema, not least for its economy in evoking a world out of joint. In The Constant Gardener (2005), concerned with shady pharmaceuti- cal testing in Africa, the lopsidedness of the frame in one sequence fulfils initially the low-grade function of showing the view from a truck that has crashed; more profoundly, however, the framing also hints at the region’s unbalancing by dark forces. Masking While the canted shot skews the film image, other cinematographic practices offer alternatives to the image’s rectangular format itself. In masked shots, variously shaped attachments to the camera lens block out some of the available light, leaving portions of the frame black or obscured. This device is most frequently used to mimic the 30 Beginning film studies 5 Canted angle in The Third Man (1949). Note also the scene’s use of low- key lighting effect of other optical devices such as a telescope or microscope or, as in countless war films, binoculars: very common is the cut from one army’s general raising a pair of binoculars to an extreme long shot of the opposing forces, masked in the shape of the binocular lenses. Another variation in masking is the iris shot, whereby the usual rec- tangular image either contracts towards or opens out from a small circular point on the screen (respectively, irising-out and irising-in). Given that the heyday of the iris was in silent cinema and immedi- ately afterwards, its use in contemporary film tends to be nostalgic or stylised (as with Michael Winterbottom’s irising to advance the sense of self-conscious performance in A Cock and Bull Story (2005)). Movement None of the many cinematographic options discussed above implies or requires that the camera is moving. Yet cinema is a dynamic art not only because the projection of a series of discrete celluloid or digital images generates a sense of motion, but because the appara- tus involved in recording them is itself often mobile. An accurate Seeing film: mise-en-scène 31 account of the camera’s movement, however, should d ­ istinguish between practices involving shifts in its entire body and those where there is only modification of a peripheral component. In this latter category would be placed, first of all, the pan and the tilt shot (respec- tively, rotations of the camera in the horizontal and the vertical planes, achieved not by its bodily relocation but by activation of a pivoting device attached to it). It is striking that some textbooks in professional cinematography argue against the use – or, at least, overuse – of pans and tilts. For Bruce Mamer, the pan is actu- ally ‘unnatural’ since its systematic lateral movement falsifies the rapid, impressionistic, often reversible scanning of the visual field which is carried out during our extra-cinematic lives (2014: 11). Dangerously proffering certain techniques as the essence of cinema, while discounting others, this argument binds film aesthetics too closely to the properties of the human eye. Such biologically based reasoning has sometimes been used to counter another common way of achieving on-screen mobility without repositioning the camera itself: namely, the zoom (utilising a lens of variable focal length so as to produce a sensation of progressively moving towards or away from the subject – respectively, zooming-in and zooming-out). For Roy Thompson, wedded like Mamer to a realist approach that would effectively outlaw much distinctive filmmaking, the zoom is alien because it is ‘a highly artificial way of recording a picture’ (1998: 54). Categorically distinct from zooms and pans and tilts are those techniques that do involve moving the camera itself. A basic dis- tinction should be made here between horizontal and vertical manoeuvres. Horizontal camera motions commonly take the form of tracking shots (this term, deriving from tracks laid down to enable the movement of bulky film cameras, is still current, even though the balanced, lightweight equipment available now may not require such infrastructural support). A tracking shot can be varied in speed, rhythm and direction so as to generate diverse effects: if a slow, stalking motion of the camera is apt for enhancing the sus- pense of a horror film or thriller, it would be undesirably eerie in a costume drama, where tracking shots might instead trace nimble, circular patterns around participants in a formal dance. Movements in the vertical plane – the camera rising or descending on a mechan- ically operated mount of variable length – are referred to as crane 32 Beginning film studies shots. While horizontal and vertical camera motions are typically kept separate in shot design, they may sometimes be combined to ­striking effect. Here a bravura example is the three-minute opening shot of Orson Welles’s film noir Touch of Evil (1958). After begin- ning at ground level, in a Mexican border town, the camera cranes upwards and then moves laterally for a rooftop perspective before descending and resuming a tracking motion along several streets. The same unbroken shot is extended so as to incorporate most con- ceivable directions of camera movement (up, down, left, right, for- wards, backwards), as well as multiple rhythms (rapid approaches, slower advances, stately aerial sweeps) and variable distances (from the extreme close-up of a bomb attached to a car to extreme long shots of the cityscape). Besides advertising itself as a grand stylistic flourish, the shot also encompasses multiple individuals whose laby- rinthine relationships will be disclosed as the film unfolds. When a cut finally occurs in Touch of Evil, it signals a switch of cinematographic style. The measured movements of the camera give way, for a while, to a jerky motion as people run towards the site of the bomb explosion. This hectic, staccato effect is achieved by use of handheld equipment – quite innovatory at the time of Welles’s work, but widespread, even institutionalised since in genres such as war and disaster films (Cloverfield (2008), set on a panicky night when New York is under monstrous attack, is a notably sustained venture in the handheld aesthetic). One hugely important piece of portable apparatus in this respect is the Steadicam, invented in the early 1970s by US cinematographer Garrett Brown. This incorpo- rates a stabilising mount for the camera that is attached to the opera- tor, thus reproducing the handheld camera’s intimacy and extensive territorial range but without repeating its unsteady, even queasy locomotion. Discussion in Chapter 2 of Aleksandr Sokurov’s film Russian Ark (2002) will consider how the Steadicam has modified not only mise-en-scène but also editing. Focus All of those camera movements so far described potentially affect one further property of the film image: its quality of focus. Here the filmmaker’s selection from lenses that range from wide-angle through medium focal lengths to the telephoto will also be sig- Seeing film: mise-en-scène 33 nificant. Options include shallow focus, where the foremost plane of the image is sharply outlined in contrast to fuzzier middle and rear portions; deep focus, where all of the planes are defined clearly; and racking or pulling focus, where focal sharpness is redistributed in the course of a shot from foreground to background, or vice versa. As with all other cinematographic choices, these are more than merely technical matters. Deep focus, for example, first prominent in such geographically dispersed films as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Osaka Elegy (1936) and Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), has figured in film studies as a topic of ideological and philosophical debate. Bazin argues in What Is Cinema? that, mimicking our natural habits of vision, deep focus is the most humane of film modes. ‘Every technique relates to a meta- physic’, he writes elsewhere (Hillier, 1985: 78); and, for Bazin, the philosophical significance of deep focus consists in its implying the unbrokenness of space and time, since such shot composition pre- sents with perfect clarity multiple events that are occurring simul- taneously on different planes. Yet it has been a key argument of this chapter that it is dangerous to derive fixed meanings from a par- ticular technical choice. If deep focus in some films seems indeed to have harmonious, humane connotations, its occurrence elsewhere may be more ambiguous (as, for example, where it is combined with a canted camera angle). As with all other aspects of mise-en-scène, then, locally sensitive interpretation is necessary in order to assess the meaning or value of deep focus in a given context. STOP and THINK Returning to the film sequence that you surveyed earlier for pro-filmic elements, unpack now its cinematography. Identify precisely choices of camera distance; heights, angles and levels of the camera; uses, if any, of masking the lens; varieties of camera movement; and focal selections. What meanings are produced, singly and collectively, by the cinematographic options taken in the sequence? Is there ­coherence – or per- haps dissonance – among the techniques used? Narrowing your focus still further, select just a few shots from the sequence (remembering that a shot is a segment of 34 Beginning film studies continuous filming before a cut or some other transition). In each of these shots, alter at least one cinematographic vari- able. For example, the extreme long shot of Julie Andrews singing exultantly with her arms outstretched on an Austrian mountain at the start of The Sound of Music (1964) might remain but be masked now by binocular lenses, or might occur with the camera lowered in height from the sky to edelweiss level. How do the adjustments that you make transform the meaning of your chosen shots? Broadening your range of reference, select one or two of the cinematographic practices outlined above – the close-up, perhaps, or the pan, or the canted shot – and review their use in films with which you are familiar. Test one of this chapter’s arguments by assessing whether the meanings generated by these techniques are relatively stable and uniform or, on the contrary, variable and context-specific. Colour and its meanings When the Russian writer Maxim Gorky attended an early pro- gramme of Lumière films in 1896, the new medium struck him not so much as freshly stimulating the senses as causing two kinds of sensory deficit. Chapter 3 will turn to Gorky’s remarks on the soundlessness of film compared with everyday noise; here, however, we draw attention to his observations on film’s disquieting lack of colour: ‘Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey’ (Leyda, 1960: 407). Gorky was, of course, writing during that earliest cinematic moment when monochrome images – their monochrome also quite undifferentiated tonally – were all that were possible. A little later, hand-painting of some film frames would begin, followed first by arti- ficial colouring of sequences through stencilling, toning and tinting, then by capture of the entire colour spectrum on film’s photographic medium itself, most vividly in the Technicolor process that was pio- neered in 1917. Yet it is striking that in his very early contribution to commentary on cinema, Gorky should give the question of colour an Seeing film: mise-en-scène 35 importance which it has occupied only occasionally in later film stud- ies. While such a lack has been partly rectified by Bristol University’s recent programme of research in this field and by publication of a number of important books (see this chapter’s ‘Selected reading’), film studies has often been marked by what David Batchelor calls chromo- phobia: a tendency, seen by Batchelor as extending beyond coverage of cinema to that of painting too, for colour as an object of interest to be ‘systematically marginalized’ and ‘diminished’ (2000: 22). There have been only a few instances, in fact, when colour has been paramount in thinking about film. Its growing availability to Hollywood before World War II, for example, occasioned fierce debate between on the one hand those welcoming it just as they had sound as an enhance- ment of cinema’s capacity to document the world fully, and on the other hand anti-realists like the German-born critic Rudolf Arnheim who deplored colour – as in his 1935 essay, ‘Remarks on Colour Film’ – for threatening the aesthetics of cinema that had developed during the monochrome era. More typically, however, film studies has either treated colour cursorily or omitted it altogether. The topic’s historic lack of status is fairly reflected by the fact that it occupies only a few pages even in the encyclopaedic account given of mise-en-scène by Bordwell and Thompson in Film Art. Bordwell and Thompson place colour within the pro-filmic ele- ments of mise-en-scène, notably as a sub-class of ‘setting’. This makes some sense: colour signifies powerfully in cinematic loca- tions ranging from the beige hospital spaces of Dallas Buyers Club (2013) to the variously red, green and white portions of the baroque restaurant in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). It is also to be found elsewhere in the pro-filmic range, especially as a key attribute of costume. However, besides dwelling, as it were, on the surface of objects scanned by the camera, colour is also liable to be augmented, altered, even invented at the cinematographic level. As in the case of Three Kings, filmmakers working with celluloid may begin by choosing a stock that produces unexpected colour relations. During filming itself they might select from a number of filtering media that moderate or even exclude cer- tain colours while promoting others (Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) systematically uses colour filters to achieve three distinct looks of bleached-out yellow, steely blue and vibrant primaries, 36 Beginning film studies each c­ orresponding to one of the film’s several narrative strands). Colour may also be chemically modified after filming via manipula- tions of the developing process. All of these adjustments to colour are feasible even without taking into account the multiple creative possibilities that have been opened up by the decision of many cur- rent filmmakers to shoot on digital videotape rather than traditional stock. However it is achieved, colour performs a number of functions in film. Besides serving as a device for historical and geographical authentication (black for Victorian England, say), or as a means of genre specification (few dull browns crop up in 1950s American musicals, few pinks in Ken Loach’s radical political dramas), colour may, as in Traffic, contribute towards narrative organisation. Exemplary here is the Chinese martial arts film Hero (2002), which has a tripartite colour scheme: red and gold, white and green, and blue. But whereas in Soderbergh’s film these colour motifs are dis- tributed spatially, in Hero they are segmented temporally, with one replacing the other to mark the shift to another version of key events that are in dispute. The example of Hero also alerts us to colour’s symbolic and thematic potentialities. Consider briefly some work by one of contemporary Hollywood’s more distinctive colourists, Tim Burton. In Edward Scissorhands, the vivid primaries used for the suburb’s houses would seem to connote optimism and well-being; however, the excessive saturation of these colours, coupled with the fact that no darker or mixed shades are visible, alerts the specta- tor to a critique of suburban blandness and conformity. By con- trast, black in the clothing worn by Johnny Depp as Edward carries suggestions of rebelliously Gothic, romantic, even punk sensibility (as well as hinting at a racial diversity repressed by the all-white suburb). While maintaining a thematic approach to colouring, how- ever, Burton reverses the value of particular hues in the animated Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005). Bright primary colours signify positively now, suggesting the vibrancy of the film’s underworld as against the oppressive society above ground that subsists in a grey as monotonous and desolate as that observed by Gorky. Variations of this kind across the work of a single director indicate the need for us to be sensitive to film colour’s multiple interpretative possibilities. Film studies requires alertness to the Seeing film: mise-en-scène 37 many p ­ ossible forms of what the art critic John Gage calls ‘colour-­ thinking’ (1993: 8). Experimental British director Derek Jarman, who worked with colour in painting and gardening as well as in cinema, evokes a state virtually of chromatic chaos when he refers to ‘the bordello of the spectrum’: one person’s ‘green of birth’ might be another’s ‘colour of pus’ (1995: 52, 70). While Jarman makes a fair point about people’s differing chromatic sensibilities, it would be unsatisfactory for study of film colour to consist simply in inven- torying a mass of subjective impressions. One way to move beyond discussion of individual tastes, then, is to explore the cultural deter- minations of colour on screen. Chromatic effects in film have, to begin with, a history: the Technicolor sequences of The Wizard of Oz carried a greater utopian charge in Depression-era America than they can do in the colour-saturated consumer economy of the United States today. Chromatic effects also have a geography: the ‘colour world of England’, for instance, ‘is not the same as that of Berlin’ (Batchelor, 2000: 37). In similar vein, the Soviet film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein acknowledges that ‘differ- ent countries have different notions of colour. For example, white here is not associated with grief, whereas for the Chinese it is the colour of mourning’ (1996: 323). Finally, we should also register and explore ‘the gendering of colour’ (Gage, 1993: 208). Without endorsing a crudely classificatory approach that looks out for ‘mas- culine’ earth tones and ‘feminine’ lavenders and lilacs, sensitivity to the relations in particular film contexts between colour coding and sexual politics is important. The history of colour in cinema is one of its normalisation. From patchy beginnings in only the most commercially advantaged cin- ematic cultures, it has come to be globally adopted: part, indeed, of the common sense of film now. This naturalisation of colour, however, means that in our period heightened significance may be accrued by work that is variously shot or processed in monochrome (or, using less technically precise terminology, ‘black-and-white’). Recently, colour has been renounced not only by avant-gardists but by some directors still aiming for mass audiences: Michael Hazanavicius’s Oscar-winning The Artist (2011), for instance, or Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013), or Ben Wheatley’s English Civil War drama, A Field in England (2013), or Pawel Pawlikowski’s 38 Beginning film studies Ida (2013), set in a bleak Poland of the early 1960s. If each of these films aptly utilises monochrome to advance a sense of ‘pastness’, that is not to say that this stylistic choice conduces only to nostalgia or elegy. Colour’s expunging from film may, in fact, be as semioti- cally rich and varied as its exploitation. Case study: 12 Years a Slave (2013) For Steve McQueen, the British director of 12 Years a Slave, fashioning his film’s visual dimension was charged with ethical and political seriousness. ‘All I wanted to do was see those images’, he says in an interview, referring to the many shots he includes of African American slaves being abused, punished, even killed: ‘That has always been the power for me. Seeing those images’ (McQueen and Gates, 2013: 1). Mise-en-scène, then, he conceives as a principal means of political intervention, intended to counter sanitised, sentimental imagery of slavery in the United States that extends back through other films such as Gone with the Wind (1939) to the photographs and paintings of their slave ‘families’ that pater- nalistic slaveholders commissioned during the nineteenth century. However, if there is great promise in McQueen’s attempt to trans- form slavery’s visual repertoire by his framing of scenes of vio- lence, there are dangers too. Scholars remind us that making a spectacle of punishment was central to how slavery functioned as a system. As Jasmine Nichole Cobb writes, ‘an entire visual culture’ was designed around ‘displays of violence and the promo- tion of surveillance’: ‘Slavery depended upon racialized notions of visibility and objective observation […] making visual culture the central location for the sedimentation of slavery’s faulty racial logics’ (2014: 340). This sense of the visual as crucial both to slavery’s institutional reproduction and to its possible undoing makes 12 Years a Slave an apt choice for studying mise-en-scène. Here, therefore, we consider a short sequence of the film that starts some forty-seven minutes in and concludes three minutes later. The episode begins with Chapin, overseer of the first plantation on which Solomon Northup is enslaved following his kidnapping, exiting the frame after he has saved Northup from lynching by the vengeful Tibeats Seeing film: mise-en-scène 39 but o­ therwise done nothing to alleviate his desperate situation (tied by the neck to an overhanging tree branch with only the fact that his feet just reach the ground preventing him from being strangled). The sequence concludes, after a change in the natural lighting that indicates that Northup’s punishment extends into the evening, with his being being cut free by the plantation owner Ford. How should we evaluate mise-en-scène here, in particular the elements of shot distance, focus and setting? Careful consideration is needed of how, exactly, the viewer is positioned with regard to this spectacle of Northup’s punishment almost to the point of death. A few moments before this scene, challenging Tibeats’s provocative assertion that the carpentry he is doing on a new plantation building is not square, Northup has said: ‘It’s all a matter of perspective.’ Perspective, now rendered an issue of great ethical moment, is vital to consider in the sequence under discussion. McQueen’s shot selection here potentially elic- its identification between us as viewers and Northup’s persecutors who wish to look upon his punishment. Responding in particular to a long shot of this site of violence that lasts significantly more than a minute, Valerie Smith speaks of an ‘unbearably long take’ that ‘requires viewers to watch the scene of Northup’s torment and to be aware of our status as spectators’ (2014: 363). At the same time, however, the ethical problem of gazing indifferently upon Northup’s suffering is self-consciously posed by McQueen’s shot design, raising the possibility of the film viewer’s moral adjustment. Choices of camera positioning and focal depth are especially impor- tant in this regard. Chapin the overseer, for example, is clearly seen in the background of one shot, gazing towards Northup; while not absolutely sharing Northup’s viewing position, the camera’s placement close to him at this point evokes in the film’s spectator identification with the suffering figure rather than complacent occu- pation of the oppressor’s perspective. Something similar occurs a bit later in the sequence, when, with the camera placed just behind the suspended Northup, Ford’s wife appears on the balcony of the plantation house. McQueen allows us to register in the same composition both the luxurious mansion and – out of focus, but still clearly d ­ ecipherable – the noose around Northup’s neck, subtly unveiling how slaveholders’ privilege was enabled and sustained by 40 Beginning film studies punishment of others. The shot bears out a fact about slavery noted by Brian Jarvis: ‘Punishment was not an unfortunate by-product of a means of production; economic and punitive imperatives were irrevocably integrated’ (2004: 81). There may be risks in the sheer vividness with which Northup’s individual suffering is realised in this sequence. From his first work in video art through to his direction of the earlier feature films Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011), McQueen has been fascinated by the particularities of bodies put into heightened situations; unsur- prisingly, then, in this scene from 12 Years a Slave his camera is attentive to the distortions of Northup’s body as he struggles to avoid hanging himself. While some shots show the totality of his awkwardly aligned figure, others venture closer, registering graphically his harrowed face and even his feet and lower legs as they slither in the mud. The spectator may be drawn by these vivid details to perceive individualised suffering, rather than any allusion to slavery’s institutional violence. This would make the sequence vulnerable to comments made by the Slovenian political and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek against undue emphasis on what he terms ‘subjective’ violence. By subjective violence, Žižek means visible aggressions ‘performed by a clearly identifiable agent’ (2008: 1); as a category, it is to be contrasted with the less immediately vis- ible ‘systemic’ violence, that is to say ‘the often catastrophic con- sequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’ (1). The problem with visual representations of subjective violence, for Žižek, is precisely their powerful, direct effect upon the spectator: ‘the overpowering horror of violent acts and empa- thy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking’ (3). Applied to the sequence from 12 Years a Slave, this argument would have it that the horror of Northup’s near-strangulation and the procuring of audience empathy with him inhibit thinking about the systemic violence of slavery (of which the appalling cruelty directed against Northup constitutes only a fragment). Evidence can be gathered from McQueen’s film, however, to counter such reasoning and to suggest that in fact subjective and sys- temic violences may be recognised simultaneously here. Certainly, images from elsewhere in 12 Years a Slave place Northup’s s­ uffering Seeing film: mise-en-scène 41 in the context of collective trauma: the film’s opening shot, for example, shows him standing amidst fellow slaves. Yet even within the sequence under discussion, aspects of mise-en-scène serve to dramatise slavery’s systemic functioning, Again, here, questions of framing and focus are crucial. As the suspended Northup is seen in the painfully drawn-out long shot, for instance, other slaves are shown going unobtrusively about their labours in the background (Figure 6). The effect is not one of their callous indifference to his plight, but, rather, of their recognition of its unexceptional quality, powerfully evoking for the spectator the routinisation of cruelty during slavery. In another shot from this sequence, Northup’s head, positioned close to the camera, is blurred, while sharply focused in the background are slave children continuing to play. As with the previous shot, the viewer is prompted by this image to co-ordinate investment in Northup’s suffering with larger reflection on slavery’s normalisation of violence. It is important also to consider the setting of this episode. 12 Years a Slave is, unexpectedly perhaps, a beautiful film, replete with well-crafted images of lush vegetation, silvery-blue bayous and beguiling sunsets. In the scene under review, the tree from which Northup is hanging is covered picturesquely by Spanish moss; behind, the plantation mansion, painted a pleasingly pure white, is overspread by foliage. To enhance the aesthetic effect of this setting, McQueen also designs his frames with formal sensitiv- ity: the long shot of Northup hanging, for example, observes the rule of thirds, situating his figure harmoniously against both vertical and horizontal axes (again as shown in Figure 6). While there is the danger that some spectators will succumb to moral amnesia in gazing upon this attractively composed scene, a more likely reac- tion, however, is shock at the juxtaposition between formal beauty and symmetry on the one hand and moral ugliness and distortion on the other. There are parallels here with the landscape of vio- lence mapped by Toni Morrison in her novel of African American slavery, Beloved (1987): ‘Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world’ (1988: 6). The protagonist of Beloved experiences a terrifying moment of being distracted by this beauty from the suffering of fellow slaves: 42 Beginning film studies 6 The spectacle of punishment: Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup in 12 Years a Slave (2013) ‘It shamed her – remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys’ (6). If such moral diversion is also possible during this episode of 12 Years a Slave, it is nevertheless guarded against by McQueen’s formal choices. Variable shot distances and focal depths, as discussed above, combine to register the disruptive- ness in this alluring setting of the violence aimed at Northup. The disturbing effect of actor performance should be noted, too, given Chiwetel Ejiofor’s embodiment of his suffering as he hangs from the tree. However, while this discussion has tried to show the usefulness of mise-en-scène analysis, the partiality of such an approach should also be acknowledged. The meaning of this epi- sode, after all, inheres not in a single image but in the articulation of several shots (for example, cuts from more distanced, potentially more distracted shots of Northup to tighter framing of his pain). Hence the importance of moving beyond individual shot analysis to a concern with editing, the subject of this book’s next chap- ter. Similarly, this episode’s meanings are not generated by visual components alone but by sound design also. As the sequence plays out, the noise of cicadas buzzing – evocative of a sleepy afternoon in the American South – is violated by sounds of Solomon’s chok- ing and of his boots squelching in the mud. Suggestively, just a few moments before, Northup has said to Tibeats, ‘I simply ask you use all your senses before rendering judgement’ – advice we will heed in Chapter 3 by extending consideration of film’s formal qualities from the visual to the aural.