Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation
By John Gibbs
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Mise-en-scène - John Gibbs
SHORT CUTS
INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES
OTHER TITLES IN THE SHORT CUTS SERIES
THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH Paul Wells
THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOOD’S PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES Paul McDonald
SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska
EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA David Gillespie
READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM Deborah Thomas
DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE Stephen Keane
THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY John Saunders
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS Vicky Lebeau
COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM Sarah Street
NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS Sheila Cornelius with Ian Haydn Smith
SCENARIO: THE CRAFT OF SCREENWRITING Tudor Gates
ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP Paul Wells
WOMEN’S CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN Alison Butler
BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT Samantha Lay
FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Valerie Orpen
AVANT-GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS Michael O’Pray
PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN Jane Barnwell
NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Julia Knight
EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY Simon Popple and Joe Kember
MUSIC IN FILM: SOUNDTRACKS AND SYNERGY Pauline Reay
MELODRAMA: GENRE STYLE SENSIBILITY John Mercer and Martin Shingler
FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA Janet McCabe
FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECIATION Andrew Klevan
NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE Holly Willis
THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE Susan Smith
TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN Timothy Shary
FILM NOIR: FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY Mark Bould
DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY Paul Ward
THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS Peter Krämer
ITALIAN Neo-realISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY Mark Shiel
WAR CINEMA: HOLLYWOOD ON THE FRONT LINE Guy Westwell
FILM GENRE: FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO IDEOLOGY Barry Keith Grant
ROMANTIC COMEDY: BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS GENRE Tamar Jeffers McDonald
SPECTATORSHIP: THE POWER OF LOOKING ON Michele Aaron
CRIME FILMS: INVESTIGATING THE SCENE Kirsten Moana Thompson
SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: SUCH THINGS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Carolyn Jess-Cooke
THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: A NEW LOOK Naomi Greene
MISE-EN-SCÈNE
FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION
JOHN GIBBS
WALLFLOWER
LONDON and NEW YORK
A Wallflower Book
Published by
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York • Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © John Gibbs 2002
All rights reserved.
E-ISBN 978-1-903-36406-2
A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-1-903364-06-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-50311-2 (e-book)
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.
CONTENTS
list of illustrations
acknowledgments
introduction
1 the elements of mise-en-scène
2 the interaction of elements
3 coherent relationships
4 investigations in the critical history of mise-en-scène
5 mise-en-scène and melodrama
6 case study: imitation of life
conclusion
appendix
notes
bibliography
index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Notorious
2 La Règle du Jeu
3 La Règle du Jeu
4 Caught
5 North by Northwest
6 North by Northwest
7 North by Northwest
8 North by Northwest
9 The Lusty Men
10 Laura
11 The General
12 One Week
13 One Week
14 One Week
15 One Week
16 Lone Star
17 Lone Star
18 Lone Star
19 Lone Star
20 Lone Star
21 Lone Star
22 Lone Star
23 The Lusty Men
24 Strangers on a Train
25 Strangers on a Train
26 Strangers on a Train
27 Strangers on a Train
28 The Searchers
29 The Searchers
30 The Searchers
31 The Searchers
32 All That Heaven Allows
33 There’s Always Tomorrow
34 Letter From an Unknown Woman
35 Letter From an Unknown Woman
36 Letter From an Unknown Woman
37 Letter From an Unknown Woman
38 Imitation of Life
39 Imitation of Life
40 Imitation of Life
41 Imitation of Life
42 Imitation of Life
43 Imitation of Life
44 Imitation of Life
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank those who taught me at the Department of Film and Drama at the University of Reading: Jim Hillier, Mike Stevenson, Lib Taylor and Stephen Lacey, Douglas Pye and the late Andrew Britton. I should particularly like to thank Douglas Pye who was a wonderful supervisor; I have benefited enormously from the intelligence and generosity of his teaching, as has this book. Although quite distinct from my thesis, the present book draws on much of the research that went into that project, and on many of the ideas that were shared with me whilst I was working on it. In this regard I am also indebted to Ian Cameron, V.F. Perkins, Charles Barr and Alan Lovell, who consented to be interviewed for the thesis and who provided many valuable observations. I should also like to thank my students and my colleagues at the Film and Television Division at the London College of Printing, who have provided an immensely stimulating environment in which to teach: some very exciting work, practical and critical, is taking place there. I am grateful to the members of the Reading and South London close reading groups, the Sewing Circle and the Quilting B, particularly those members of the Sewing Circle who took part in the session on Lone Star in December 1998. Thank you too to Andrew Klevan for discussing Imitation of Life and Lone Star with me, Iris Luppa for directions on Brecht, Jacob Leigh for his assistance in preparing the illustrations, and Jonathan Bignell for help getting started. My thanks and love are due to Rebecca and to my family for their ongoing inspiration and support. I would also like to thank Yoram Allon and his colleagues at Wallflower Press for the opportunity, and for their patience.
One of the aims of this book is to explore the expressive potential of visual style in the cinema, another to celebrate a tradition of criticism sensitive to mise-en-scène. I would like to acknowledge the accomplishments of the critics who are quoted below, and the extraordinary achievements of the film-makers they write about.
INTRODUCTION
In writing about film, ‘mise-en-scène’ is sometimes used as a straightforward descriptive term but it is really a concept, complicated but central to a developed understanding of film. This book begins with a workable definition of the term, but the chapters that follow are designed to explore the more complex aspects of the concept. By the end of the book, I hope that the different nuances of mise-en-scène will have been made clear, but along the way—such is the importance of mise-en-scène—we will have encountered a whole range of ideas concerned with the way films work and the methods which critics have developed to understand them.
Thinking and writing of mise-en-scène—which is concerned with visual style in the cinema—helped the study of film achieve maturity. Yet many textbooks of today, including those which aim to give an introduction to the subject area, underestimate the importance of mise-en-scène. Some writers offer inadequate or even incorrect definitions of the term, while others seem unaware of the full implications of visual style.
There is, however, some superb writing which is alive to the importance of mise-en-scène and sensitive to the complexities of film style. The introductions to film studies may not point you in its direction, and some of the articles may only be found in discontinued journals or copyright libraries, but a fine tradition of material nevertheless exists. An important role of this book, therefore, is identifying approaches that have already been developed and employed. My task is less about saying something new, and more one of bringing together in the same place, some of the ways in which mise-en-scène has been thought about and put to use.
In fact, I have made a deliberate strategy of quoting from the work of other critics, and I have not quoted from any articles I do not consider to be excellent and worth pursuing. This strategy of drawing attention to existing style-based criticism is consolidated in the Appendix, which aims to guide the reader in the direction of the best writing in the field.
Chapter 1 introduces a working definition of mise-en-scène and, making use of a range of quotations, explores the expressive potential of its constituent parts. The emphasis of Chapter 2 is on the integration of different elements of mise-en-scène, how they work in conjunction. It takes a sequence from Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996) as an extended example. Chapter 3 examines ideas of integration and coherence at greater length, and discusses some of the problems that arise when elements are not considered in relationship. Chapter 4 looks at the history of mise-en-scène within the development of serious film criticism, which helps to explain a number of the ideas that are bound up in the term. Two particular areas which are explored are the traditional associations of mise-en-scène with popular cinema and with ideas of authorship. Chapter 5 continues this historical thrust in its investigation of ways in which critics have explored visual style, but with a particular emphasis on the mise-en-scène of Hollywood melodrama. Chapter 6 is a case study, which examines strategies employed in the melodrama Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), and demonstrates in practice some of the approaches discussed in previous chapters. After the Conclusion, which reflects on the ongoing importance of sensitivity to film style, comes the Appendix, an extensive annotated reading list that identifies some of the best writing on film style and mise-en-scène.
I hope this book will be useful to students of film, on practical courses as well as critical/theoretical courses, and to the film enthusiast at large. In the introduction to her recent volume of criticism, the novelist A.S. Byatt writes of her belief in ‘teaching good reading as the best way of encouraging, and making possible, good writing’ (2000: 1). I am not qualified to say whether she is correct about creative writing, and I am less sure that the same thing might be true of film, given the range of creative, practical and technical skills that a film-maker needs to develop. However, I do believe that good viewing is an essential part of making possible good film-making. An appreciation of what is possible is partly dependent on a true recognition of what has already been achieved, and a sense of how style relates to meaning is fundamental to film-making and film viewing alike.
This is a book about the different visual forms through and with which film-makers have worked expressively, but it is also a book about criticism, and the techniques that writers have developed to elucidate and celebrate those accomplishments.
A note on spelling
Personally, I favour the version of mise-en-scène with hyphens and without italicisation, as it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary. However ‘mise-en-scène’ is spelt in different ways by different critics. In French it appears without hyphens, and a number of writers and translators whom I have quoted employ this version, sometimes italicising the