Mise en Scene as Technology:
Reconnecting the art with the technical
At the heart of all discussions of cinema style, form and, indeed, cinema as an art; is Mise en Scene. It seems such a simple thing...
The fundamental tool at the filmmaker’s disposal is their ability to selectively and specifically populate the frame with visible things; to place into the frame what is important, to leave out what is not and to arrange those contents in such a way as to produce understanding and comprehension on the part of the viewer.
As such, it seemed an obvious stride for theatrical ideas of being ‘on-stage’ to step over to the new illuminated moving image and for the camera viewfinder’s frame to take on the same micro-universe as the proscenium arch. Hence the term, derived from the French, Mise en scene meaning, rather literally, to ‘place on the stage’ or ‘put into the scene’. As such Mise en Scene is decidedly a verb - or as they taught us in primary school - a 'doing' word, an action.
However, despite referring as it does - in literal terms - to a proactive undertaking by a filmmaker, the term is most widely used in scholarly examination of cinema as a means of post-creation analysis; an analysis that is very often exceedingly broad in its judgment of artistic merit, cultural position, and sociological attitude rather specific artistic style and filmmaking craft. For filmmakers Mise en scene is a verb, a process; but for cinema studies it has been hijacked and corralled into service as a passive and openly re-interpreted noun.
Leveraging a literary vocabulary and a cultural-studies analytical structure in favour of an artistic or aesthetic one, contemporary cinema studies have mistakenly assumed the understanding of one leads directly and irrefutably to the other. More arrogantly, such cultural critiques assume to be able to explain all developments in cinema through prisms of sociology and culture. “scholars do seem to expect that a broad cultural perspective ought to yield insights into how films work”. (Bordwell, D 2005, p242) Bordwell goes on to say, more tersely, in the essay ‘Film and the Historical Return’, “I find it hard to imagine a convincing sociological explanation for why film stock was standardized at a width of 35mm.” (2005) It’s this linkage between the analysis of cinema’s forms and the comprehension of its processes (and moreover its technology) of creation that is inescapable. And yet this link is one often, at best, downplayed or, at worst, dismissed. In revisiting the seminal work of Andre Bazin, Donato Torato has cited Bazin’s perspective that cinema is:
“only consequently technical… the idea precedes the invention and hence is superior to the technical means used to achieve it. " (Bazin, A 1967 cited in Torato, D 2003)
And yet whilst Bazin’s humanist perspective (commensurate, we might say, with Eienstein’s assertion that imagination is more important than knowledge) touches our instinct to celebrate human ingenuity over ‘mere technology’, the assertion is also highly problematic for understanding cinematic process. The idea of technology as the formal follower of creative desire is one fraught with exceptions. A great many of the technical advances in moving image production preceded blindly the aesthetics and visual creative opportunities they spawned. Take for example the interlaced-image of traditional television and video. Rather than discreet individual frames shown in progression and producing the ‘persistence of vision’ fundamental to our perception of a moving-image, a traditional interlaced TV picture delivers alternate fields of horizontal lines; odd and even. On the first pass the screen displays the lines 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 etc. On the second it fills in the spaces with the alternate rows; 2, 4, 6, 8 and so on. The result is half as much visual information in each visual increment but displayed twice as often; in other words, with twice the frequency. The technological impetus for interlacing was simply pragmatic; to provide an electronic match in the TV set with the standard oscillations of the domestic power-grid. In much of the world electricity is delivered to the home at 50hertz – 50 oscillations per second. As such television in these countries operates at 50 interlaced fields per second resulting in an effective 25 full frames per second. In North America (and a small set of other countries such as Japan) the power grid operates at 60hertz and so NTSC television signals are carried as 60 interlaced fields or 30 frames per second . Both these methods introduced a uniquely distinct visual aesthetic for the moving image which moved significantly away from the visual ‘feel’ of the long established look of celluloid film. The resulting aesthetic of the higher frequency of visual information in the image through interlacing was one that quickly took on cultural significance with the ‘TV-look’ being popularly associated and read by viewers as intrinsically connected to forms of documentary, verbatim, reportage and, by proxy, constructs of authenticity. The TV aesthetic subsequently become a creative tool at the disposal of filmmakers to engage with and exploit ingrained cultural literacies on the part of the viewer.
This pattern of Invention as the Mother of Necessity, rather than the more commonly quoted inverse, is one that runs very much counter to Bazin’s assertion above. It would be extremely difficult to argue that filmmakers prior to the invention of television and the arrival of interlaced imagery in the 1950’s were proactively seeking such an aesthetic or the specific cultural resonance and visual language interlacing delivered. But regardless, once the technology had indeed delivered this new aesthetic possibility, filmmakers have been continually prompted to exploit it. One may look at feature narrative films such as Spike Lee’s ‘Bamboozled’ which combines 16mm film footage with MiniDV interlaced video to produce vastly different and contrasting visual aesthetics. The film centres on a ‘show with a show’ premise where by a TV studio show runner and his cast produce a satirical ‘black-face’ minstrel show. The scenes of the TV ‘show-within-the-show’ itself are shot 16mm and thus present a familiar narrative film aesthetic to the audience. However all scenes that depict the show’s making and the ‘real’ people who play the characters in the ‘show-within-a-show’ are shot with MiniDV. As a result the visual language of these sequences draws upon a cultural connection - linked invariably to interlaced imagery and technology - within the audience and their association with TV news, reporting, factual depiction and documentary rather than the glossy, other-worldly, and familiar fictionality of celluloid film.
Such an example, whereby a technological advance with a purely practical or external impetuous and inception, becomes the sire of a new creative direction in cinema aesthetics is certainly not an isolated case. Indeed the very arguments and aesthetic championing of Bazin himself becomes paradoxical in this light. For Bazin the construct of Deep-Focus cinematography, whereby subjects at different distances from the camera lens could be held in consistent focus, was “a dialectical step forward in the history of film language” (Bazin 1967 cited in Monarco 1981, p330) And yet the deep-focus Bazin was so enamored by was a direct result of molecular chemistry not artistic desire for a change in ‘film language’. The development of faster film stocks with larger grain, and subsequently higher ISO ratings able to react faster to light, meant that camera lens apertures could be contracted to a larger f-stop value (smaller aperture) without under-exposing. The by-product of a smaller aperture is deeper depth-of-field, sharp focus from foreground to background rather than the more selective shallow focus where distant objects from the subject are rendered blurred. From a specific advance in chemical processes deep-focus photography was born and glorious examples such as that in Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) stood for Bazin as the epitome of film-art and heralded a paradigm shift in the language of filmmaking.
It is possible that Bazin would argue that the idea and creative desire for deep-focus pre-existed its technical invention and the development of faster film stocks was simply the fulfillment of the idea that allowed that idea to be realized. In examining Widescreen cinema just as Bazin had engaged with deep-focus cinema, his contemporary Jaques Rivette had argued that prior to the development of Cinemascope widescreen format filmmakers wanted and desired 'breadth' in their composition but couldn't have it, limited by the technology and as such the move to Cinemascope freed them from shackles that has previously been imposed upon them. Rivette declares in his article ‘The age of metteurs en scene’ that this is evidenced in "so many pans, lateral tracking shots, careful arrangement of characters over the surface of the screen" (1985, p277) Rivette’s perspective would suggest that Cinemascope was the fulfillment of a pre-existing creative Auteur desire, hence Necessity as the mother of Invention and the Idea leading the Technology rather than the idea exploiting technology once it has arrived. But such a perspective seems narrow and blinkered - not considering other imperatives - and so becomes a distinctly diluted way to consider and understand the development of the cinema apparatus. It is just as likely that deep-focus was a side effect of an economic imperative, particularly for the Hollywood studio system – that of Lighting. With slow film stocks enormous amounts of light (and, as such, lighting equipment) are required. Thus the push for faster film stocks may been seen as more directly connected with economics of scale and efficiency of production on the part of studios, than any creative desire by filmmakers. The unavoidable side-effect however in any case was that once filmmakers ‘needed’ less light they were given choice - choose to employ less light or use the same amount of light and close down the aperture of the camera. The result with the later being deep-focus; perhaps not at all what the studios intended. Cinemascope may be viewed in the same way, a means for the studios to generate a selling point for their films and garner greater audience share; the power of spectacle to sell seats is only later exploited for artistic purposes.
From either perspective, certainly there is a greater set of economic and market intricacies influencing the development of cinema production, and the business models that drive it, than auteur creative desire. As such, asserting as Bazin does, that cinema is “only consequently technical” seems at best problematic and at worst not useful in any attempt to more fully understand cinema aesthetics or the relationship between cinema experience and the cinema process. As French filmmaker Eric Rohmer has commented in his article ‘the cardinal virtues of cinemascope’ “The cinema is indebted to a technician for its existence” (1985, p282)
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- David Bordwell, Figures traced in light: on cinematic staging (Berkley: University of California press, 2005).
- Donato Totaro, “Andre bazin Revisited. André Bazin: Part 1, Film Style Theory in its Historical Context,” July 31, 2003, http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/bazin_intro.html.
- James Monarco, How to read a film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
- Jaques Rivette, “The age of mettuers en scene,” in Cahiers du Cinema. the 1950's. Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 275-79.
- Eric Rohmer, “The cardinal virtues of cinemascope,” in Cahiers du Cinema. the 1950's. Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 280-83.
