Mise en Scène and Film Style

From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art

A. Martin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349444175, 9781137269942
• eBook ISBN: 9781137269959
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

Styles of filmmaking have changed greatly from classical Hollywood through to our digital era. So, too, have the ways in which film critics and scholars have analysed these transformations in film style. This book explores two central style concepts, mise en scène and dispositif, to illuminate a wide range of film and new media examples.

1

A Term That Means Everything, and Nothing Very Specific

When it comes to the hallowed, foundational terms that shape the field of film studies – words like montage or cinephilia or auteur or genre, words that have launched a million books and articles – I have come to believe it is wise to take heed of the warning of Paul Willemen (1944–2012), as voiced in the 1990s (Willemen, 1994, p. 226). For him, such cherished words have rarely defined anything precise in cinema; rather, they mark a confusion, a fumbling attempt to pinpoint some murky confluence of wildly diverse factors. We need such terms, he agreed, but we should not believe or trust in them too fervently. Rather, they present a smokescreen (or, in the psychoanalytic terms used by Willemen, a ‘neurotic knot’ or displacement): for some commentators, tantalising as a mystery that can prompt further work into their meaning and origin; or, for those who obediently trot them out as rote learning, simply asphyxiating. Has anyone ever involved in teaching film not experienced, at some time or other, that horrible, crunching sensation when, once a strict definition of something has been uttered in the classroom – no matter how provisionally, no matter how quickly freighted with numerous qualifications – you know that, all the same, you have just helped to further perpetuate that smokescreen of faux certainty?

Willemen, as it happens, was not too fond of the concept or buzzword of mise en scène, either – when he did refer to it (which was not often), it was prefixed with a withering ‘so-called’ – implying that it was either a bad term for the specific thing in cinema it was trying to describe, or that what it was trying to describe was a much vaster phenomenon than anything countenanced by the term. More recently, Jacques Rancière has respectfully but categorically defined the concept of mise en scène as a ‘coarse phenomenology’. Speaking primarily of cinephilia and cinephiles – the mad love (and lovers) of the filmic medium – Rancière declares:

[Cinephilia] asserted that cinema’s greatness did not lie in the metaphysical loftiness of its subject matter nor in the visibility of its plastic effects, but in the imperceptible difference in the way it puts traditional stories and emotions into images. Cinephiles named this difference mise-en-scène without really knowing what it meant. [ ... ] Cinephilia explains its loves only by relying on a rather coarse phenomenology of mise-en-scène as the establishment of a ‘relation with the world’. (Rancière, 2012)

The accusations of Willemen and Rancière – ardent cinephiles both, let it be said – have more than a little truth to them. But mise en scène, it seems to me, is worth persevering with – not least because it already constitutes a historic object, a body of exploratory thought into cinema that can be productively revisited today. Even better, as I hope to show, it can still be used to animate much-needed explorations into cinema’s materiality.

So, what is mise en scène exactly – or inexactly? Any attempt to arrive at a workable definition needs to go down several different, discursive paths.

A clever film critic

It is sometimes useful to start an investigation into the meaning of a word or term by heading right out into the big, wide, vulgar world – far from the academic cloisters where we debate fine distinctions and micro-histories. Mise en scène is not as well known or popularised a term as auteur or genre or even montage; nonetheless, it gets around. In the early 1990s, I conducted an informal survey of occurrences of the term in mainstream media reporting of film, television and show business. Many media journalists, after all, harbour a sliver of academic film studies training in their dark past – and, if so, they like to both boast about it and disown it in the same, dazzling manoeuvre.

Matt Groening, brilliant creator of The Simpsons, penned a comic strip in 1985 titled ‘How to Be a Clever Film Critic’ as part of his Life in Hell series (1977–2012); it contains a challenge ‘For Advanced Clever Film Critics Only!’, which is: ‘Can you use mise-en-scène in a review that anyone will finish reading?’. The American celebrity gossip magazine Spy mounted an exposé of the wicked ways of Jerry Lewis (whose ‘sloppy, uneven filmmaking’, we are authoritatively told, was confused by silly, French critics with ‘Godardian antiformalism’ – strong stuff for Spy readers), hunted down those few, special individuals (including Harry Shearer from The Simpsons) who had seen Lewis’ unreleased The Day the Clown Cried from the early 1970s, and drolly enquired: ‘The mise-en-scène was problematic?’ (Handy, 1992, p. 45). Spy long ago went the way of the dinosaur, but another glossy American showbiz magazine, Premiere, is still with us today, mainly in online form; a typical opinion piece from those years began: ‘Film theorists endlessly debate the influence of Renoiresque mise-en-scène versus Eisensteinian montage. We say: Get a life!’ (Gelman-Waxner, 1991, p. 61).

To those merry journalists and entertainers, mise en scène is a pretentious term – concerned with something at best secondary but largely inessential to the filmmaking process. It would seem, to draw out the spirit of these parodies, that style – which, in the broadest sense, means the ways in which the narrative material of a film is treated, shaped and delivered to the viewer – is an afterthought in cinema, for the delectation of only the most esoteric specialists. (I can still hear ringing in my ears, from two decades ago, the voice of a newspaper sub-editor who answered my query about why he had cut my finely wrought paragraph on the camera angles in Jane Campion with the immortal words: ‘Camera angles? Who gives a damn about camera angles?’). Indeed, comments such as these take us directly back to the era when critics first felt compelled to coin (or appropriate) and fight for the term mise en scène.

Within the popular media, this mise en scène pendulum can also swing to the other extreme. Staying within my early 1990s survey, I recall hearing the Australian reviewer Peter Castaldi, reporting for radio on the Cannes Film Festival screening of Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (1992), make the following claim: ‘It has what the French call mise en scène, which is direction – with a special touch’. This effectively flips the popular assumption that mise en scène is essentially about ornamentation or sheer decoration – the special touch of colour, finery or glamour added to a scene or project – into a positive rather than negative valuation: Luhrmann is certainly a well-chosen man for that job, as he has proved in all his subsequent films, such as Moulin Rouge! (2001) and The Great Gatsby (2013).

Leaving aside, for the moment, that enigmatic and ineffable ‘touch’, note the direct equation that Castaldi casually made on air: mise en scène is direction, direction is mise en scène. In a more recent journalistic quip concerning Lena Dunham’s TV series Girls (2012– ), Australian humourist Helen Razer (2014) waxes even more absolute: ‘Nudity becomes mise en scène’. Such stark vacillation within media discourses – mise en scène is nothing, or it is everything – is echoed all the way up and down the history of film criticism and theoretically informed analysis.

So let us return, now, not to the theatrical origins of mise en scène or its very first mentions in the global literature on film, but to a particularly significant primal scene of mise en scène talk: the 1950s.

Style matters

In Europe in the 1950s, and in the English-speaking world in the early 1960s, the idea of mise en scène was a critical spearhead designed to fight entrenched, impoverished, casual notions about cinema inherited from other artistic fields, such as theatre and literature. André Bazin (1918–1958) at the head of the Cahiers team in France, Andrew Sarris (1928–2012) in Film Culture and other US publications, José Luis Guarner (1937–1993) at Film Ideal in Spain: all found themselves faced with the need to combat the idea that a film is essentially its screenplay – the prejudice that this is, common sensically, where its theme, structure and meaning reside – and that the work of style in cinema is basically mere technique, simple decoration, ‘information delivery’ or at best an efficient illustration of pre-set artistry. (The battle still rages today in many industrial debates over the director’s ‘possessory credit’ as author of a film – a legal triumph vociferously challenged by many screenwriters.) Form was something of a dirty word, in those days, to many: if a director’s technique was too evident, too visible – if the ornamentation was too extreme – it was seen as a betrayal of the content, in excess of the duty to tell a story well and clearly ... and thus an indulgent formalism.

Early attempts by sympathetic cinephile-critics to define the elements of mise en scène were, to be blunt, pretty vague – gestures toward an aesthetic, rather than a careful or patient inventory of its component parts. No wonder that, in the early 1970s, Brian Henderson labelled mise en scène the ‘grand undefined term’ of film studies (Henderson, 1980, p. 49) – since he was looking back, for example, to Alexandre Astruc’s reflection from 1959, ‘What is mise en scène?’, a lyrical piece which answers its titular question only with the broadest and most suggestive formulations, such as ‘a way of extending states of mind into movements of the body’, ‘that mysterious distance between the author and his characters’ or ‘a particular way of needing to see and to show’ (Astruc, 1985, pp. 267–68).

Much the same can be said of the formulations in Michel Mourlet’s 1959 manifesto ‘On an Ignored Art’ – written by a today still active expert practitioner of belles lettres who eschews close, formal analysis in favour of a (far from dishonourable) vision of criticism based on ‘awakening in the reader, by means of poetic communication, the feeling that a work arouses in us’ (Mourlet, 1987, p. 21). Thus, for Mourlet, the attempt to summarily define mise en scène calls forth another flurry of fairly abstract terms, elements and elevated emotional states under the telling subheading ‘Everything is in the Mise en scène’:

The curtains open. The house goes dark. A rectangle of light presently vibrates before our eyes. Soon it is invaded by gestures and sounds. Here we are absorbed by that unreal space and time. More or less absorbed. The mysterious energy which sustains with varying felicities the swirl of shadow and light and their foam of sounds is called mise en scène. It is on mise en scène that our attention is set, organising a universe, covering the screen – mise en scène, and nothing else. (qtd in Hillier, 1985, pp. 223–24)

According to Sam Rohdie’s retrospective account in 2006 of the rise of stylistic criticism in the 1950s:

In general, mise en scène denotes a new attitude to the cinema opposed to the literary cinema of the 1930s that turned scripts into images [ ... ] Mise en scène, as used by the Nouvelle Vague critics, referred to a specifically ‘cinematic’ and natural, realistic rendering of emotion and expression conveyed less by dialogue and the script, than by décor, performance, expression linked to the actor, to his movements and gestures, also to settings and the use of the camera and lighting. (Rohdie, 2006)

There are problems with this formulation, such as the assertion that, in Nicholas Ray’s films, ‘it is what you see and the way you see it, not what is said, that is crucial’ – but the main point still holds good: style matters. It is, in fact, crucial and decisive, as well as determining over our experiences as film viewers and listeners. The challenge today is not to get caught in the old, received traps and biases and, accordingly, to expand our sense of what constitutes style or form in cinema – including its action upon us as spectators.

Pure mise en scène?

Critics in the 1950s sometimes, no doubt, erred too far in the direction of asserting that a film is not its screenplay (or the novel or play from which that screenplay is derived). A cult of pure style was the inevitable outcome of this – and many argumentative convolutions based on spurious assumptions arose to back it up. In 1957, for example, the celebrated Cuban novelist G. Cabrera Infante concluded his review of Tea and Sympathy (1956) by Vincente Minnelli – a director of whose work he was particularly fond – by citing ‘two transitions that are poetic instants’ raising themselves far above the theatrical source (by Robert Anderson) that is merely ‘as successful as it is mediocre’. Here is his description of the first of these instants:

The woman has attempted futilely to hold back the boy from going to his date with the waitress because she knows that he is going to prove his manliness by destroying love. She appears at the window and looks towards the patio of the school, where, through some hedges and trees and the rain, there shines, in an inciting and malignant redness, the luminous sign of the café where the waitress works. The scene dissolves to another rain-streaked window where another woman, the waitress, closes the blind to initiate, once more almost in a mechanical caricature, the act of love which the conventions forbid to the first woman. (Cabrera Infante, 1991, p. 115)

Cabrera Infante concludes – how accurately, I am not sure – that such moments are ‘of course, not in the play. They could not have been. Not only because they are images of pure cinema, but because they prove that the true poet is named Minnelli’ (Cabrera Infante, 1991, p. 115). He assumes that his chosen moments are superior to anything in the original stage material (even though he still needs recourse to the scripted plot to evoke their particular, poetic pathos) and that, implicitly, Minnelli devised and added them.

Within the divided film culture scene of Paris in the 1950s, where the editors of Présence du cinéma (including Mourlet, Pierre Rissient and Jacques Lourcelles) tended to a ‘style for style’s sake’ position, some critics within Cahiers du cinéma groped toward a workable combination or interrelation of style and subject. In the late 1990s, the Iranian political diplomat and former Cahiers contributor Fereydoun Hoyveda (1924–2006) fondly looked back in his website postings on the polemics of that time, amplifying (under the heading ‘What is Mise en scene [sic]?’) what he first wrote in a programmatic article of 1960 titled ‘Sunspots’:

In our Parisian group of the 1950s and 1960s we deemed that the ‘thought’ of a filmmaker appears through his ‘mise-en-scene’ [sic]. Indeed what matters in a film is the desire for order, composition, harmony, the placing of actors and objects, the choice of settings, the movements within the frame, the capturing of a gesture or a look; in short, the intellectual operation which has put an initial emotion and a general idea to work. ‘Mise en-Scene’ [sic] is nothing other than the ‘technique’ invented by each author-director to express the idea and establish the specific quality of his work. (Hoyveda, 1999; see also Hoyveda, 1986, p. 142)

José Luis Guarner, in his no-less programmatic essay of 1962, ‘Parmenides’ Glasses: Some Reflections on Criticism and its Practice’ (2013), fought much the same battle against rearguard notions all around him. Influenced by Bazin, Guarner argues that mise en scène (in Spanish: la puesta en escena) is not mere technique, but a way of regarding, of expressing and embodying an attitude toward human beings and their relation to the world. He offers another Vincente Minnelli example, this time from the family melodrama Home from the Hill (1960).

The scene involves a gruff patriarch, Wade (Robert Mitchum), running verbal rings around Albert (Everett Sloane), a local citizen hoping to slyly marry his pregnant daughter off to Wade’s son, Theron (George Hamilton) – who, unbeknownst to both discussants, is actually the child’s father. Suitably humiliated and sent packing, Albert slinks out the door, down the driveway and all the way to the large front gate of the Wade residence. The f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  A Term That Means Everything, and Nothing Very Specific
• 2  Aesthetic Economies: The Expressive and the Excessive
• 3  What Was Mise en scne?
• 4  The Crises (1): Squeezed and Stretched
• 5  The Crises (2): The Style It Takes
• 6  Sonic Spaces
• 7  A Detour via Reality: Social Mise en scne
• 8  Cinema, Audiovisual Art of the 21st Century
• 9  The Rise of the Dispositif
• Epilogue: Five Minutes and Fifteen Seconds with Ritwik Ghatak
• Bibliography
• Index