Aspects of mise-en-scene

What possibilities for selection and control does mise-en-scene offer the filmmaker? We can mark out four general areas and indicate some potential uses of each.

1) Setting

Since the earliest days of cinema, critics and audiences have understood that setting plays a more active role in cinema than in most theatrical styles. Andre Bazin writes:

The human being is all-important in the theatre. The drama on the screen can exist without actors. A banging door, a leaf in the wind, waves beating on the shore can heighten the dramatic effect. Some film masterpieces use man only as an accessory, like an extra, or in counterpoint to nature, which is the true leading character.

Cinema setting, then, can come to the forefront; it need not be only a container for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action.

The filmmaker may control setting in many ways. One way is to select an already existing locale in which to stage the action, a practice stretching back to the earliest films. Louis Lumiere shot his short comedy The Waterer Watered in a garden. Today filmmakers often go on location to shoot.

On the other hand, the filmmaker may choose to construct the setting. The possibility of creating a wholly artificial world on film led to the development of several approaches to constructing setting.

Some directors have emphasized authenticity. For example, Erich von Stroheim prided himself on meticulous research into details of locale for Greed. We should remember, however, that realism in settings is partly a matter of viewing conventions. What strikes us as realistic today might seem highly stylized to future audiences.

Other films have been less committed to historical accuracy. Though D.W. Griffith studied the various historical periods presented in Intolerance, his Babylon constitutes a personal image of that city. Similarly, in Ivan the Terrible Sergei Eisenstein freely stylized the dé cor of the czar’s palace to harmonize with the lighting, costume, and figure movement, so that characters crawl through doorways that resemble mouseholes and stand frozen before allegorical murals.

Setting can overwhelm the actors, as in Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld, or it can be reduced to zero, as in Godard’s Le Gai Savoir. Settings need not possess realistic-looking buildings, as witness the comic-book cityscapes of such films as Tim Burton’s Batman.

Colour can also be an important component of settings. Robert Bresson’s L’Argent creates parallels among its various settings - home, school, and prison – by the recurrence of drab green backgrounds and cold blue props and costumes. By contrast, Jacques Tati’s Play Time displays sharply changing colour schemes. In the first portion of the film the settings and costumes are mostly gray, brown and black – cold, steely colours. Later, the settings start to sport cheery reds, pinks, and greens. This change in colours supports a narrative development which shows an inhuman city landscape that is transformed by vitality and spontaneity.

A full-size setting need not always be built. Through much of the history of the cinema,

filmmakers used miniature buildings to create fantasy scenes or simply to economize. Parts of

settings could also be done as paintings and combined photographically with full-sized sections of the space. More recently, digital special effects are used to fill in portions of the setting, such as the royal city in The Phantom Menace.

In manipulating a shot’s setting, the filmmaker may create props – short for “property”. When an object in the setting has a function within the ongoing action, we can call it “prop”. Films teem with examples: the snowstorm paperweight that shatters at the beginning of Citizen Kane, Sarah’s Connor’s hospital bed turned exercise machine in Terminator-2: Judgement Day.

In the course of a narrative, a prop may become a motif. The shower curtain in Psycho is at first an innocuous part of the setting, but when the killer enters the bathroom the curtain screens her from our sight. Later, after the murder Norman Bates usesthe curtain to wrap up the victim’s body.

d) Complete the sentences with the verbs below:

1. The extensive research _____ our conclusions.
2. We cannot _____ a Verdi opera without a chorus.
3. They ______ different images and got an interesting collage.
4. A line of fir trees _____ the house from the road.
5. He _____ the importance of colours in his film.
6. The cottages _____ well with the landscape.