Mise en space
Making and Watching through different frames
After a century of consistency and, largely, uniform incremental progression, cinema - as the art of the moving image - has entered a period of seismic upheaval and change. This is not by any means to suggest that cinema has been stagnant; the scope, form, style, delivery and experience of cinematic works have undertaken considerable and ongoing evolution. One need only place the silent-era masterpieces of Charlie Chaplin alongside the contemporary digitally-inspired cinema of David Fincher to see (at least on a surface level) those evolutions made manifestly evident.
But whilst the progression of form and style is tangibly obvious there is none the less a deeper level consistency that has remained regardless of how much clearer the moving image became, the screen size changed or performance styles altered; that is the methodology by which we read, understand and comprehend cinema.
Our understanding of cinema has been built, like that of any artform, on specific and informed assumptions; pillars put in place to signify the framework by which the art would be understood. The pillar that has defined much of cinema’s history has been a presumptive correlation between how cinema is composed and how it is interpreted. Mise en scene is the term appropriated from theatrical origins to encompass the choices a director makes in regard to the composition and population of the cinematic frame. The presumption that has long stood in this regard is that the Mise en scene is a directly shared, and bi-directional paradigm. One where filmmakers compose with the Mise en scene and the viewer experiences via the Mise en scene.
However the digital age brings with it much more than simple progressive evolution for cinematic form. The fundamental changes particular forms of digital technology herald, deliver overt changes to how cinema is made. In turn as we radically change the tools for making cinema we potentially alter the accepted assumption of a shared modality between Making and Watching.
Overwhelmingly the vast bulk of extant thought and consideration on cinema aesthetics pertains to interpretation, analysis and after-the-fact assessment of the experience of watching completed works of cinema. When analysis does fall to consideration of the production process of cinema it tends to remain fixated with auteur viewpoints attempting to articulate what a director intended and the directorial decisions they made within the Mise en scene paradigm. This focus on the intentions of the director tends to avoid the underlying production processes engaged by the director which deliver the Mise en scene experience. In effect such perspectives become a study of perceptions on what the director wanted or intended rather than what the director did.
Entrenching this dislocation between experience and production has been the presumptive Mise en scene; the unquestioned idea that the director Makes using the same paradigm as the viewer Watches. For much of the history of cinema this has been a largely effective and functional assumption to make but the seismic shifts in production process bestowed upon cinema by the digital age are profoundly altering the foundation of this assumption. For the first time there exists a clear divide between the conceptual framework employed by the cinema maker to produce a movie and that engaged by the viewer to understand and interpret the movie.
Lev Manovich writes about this concept in his discussion of motion graphics, hybrid cinema and design software:
“while the term “moving image” can be still used as an appropriate description for how the output of a design process is experienced by the viewers, it is no longer captures how the designers think about what they create. They are thinking today very differently than twenty years ago.” (Manovich, 2006.)
Here Manovich is writing about intent on the part of designers whereby the final output of their work may be a particular form, a specific experience, but one that is divorced from the production process engaged conceptually. Whilst he is referring to a specific arm of moving image media, and indeed a specific set of digital tools (those of motion graphics and layered compositing), the argument holds enormous value across a much boarder swathe of cinematic mediums. The argument points to the Mise en scene shifting emphasis and functionality; from a broad and all encompassing conceptual construct, to a much more defined and specific mechanism pertaining only to viewing and reception and largely independent of production and composition.
One means of understanding this shift, which will shape the ideas and arguments later in this text, is to consider Mise en scene in the context of Phenomenology. Whilst phenomenology represents a broad and complex philosophical system for understanding consciousness it can, in more simplistic modes, provide a useful mechanism for defining a distinction between the conscious act of composing and the consciousness of experiencing cinema.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines phenomenology as “the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view” (2003) and goes on to detail the discipline of phenomenology as focused on the “appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience.” (2003)
This somewhat convoluted definition can be distilled to the more tangible idea that phenomenology is the study of how things seem as opposed, and independent of, how they actually are; “appearances as opposed to reality” (2003). This distinction and definition is important in questioning the assumption of a shared and singular ‘phenomenon’ between Making and Watching cinema.
The first-person viewing experience of watching a screen-based work is shaped by the Mise en scene as a paradigm for presenting a readable cinematic language. But this is a phenomena of experience; a reading of the cinematic construct based on how it appears rather than how it might actually be, or more importantly how it came to be.
The Mise en scene has long been a construct for reading cinema, for analyzing meaning and artistic intent but the mistake has been to ignore the phenomenon of the cinema experience for the viewer as distinct from the process of creating and producing cinema. Traditional use of Mise en scene assumes a direct correlation between making and watching, that they follow the same precepts and tenets – the camera as a direct mirror inversion of the screen, moving image frames acquired and moving image frames delivered.
What will be argued in the following chapters it that the digital age of software production tools, hybridized and infinitely variable production processes and delivery mediums demands a separation of the phenomenology of the cinema and a distinct conceptual framework for cinema production. The intention by making such a distinction is to assemble a theoretical framework for cinema-makers to underpin and shape contemporary cinema production extraneous to the Mise en scene-based paradigm for cinema watchers.
Certainly there is a complex relationship between making and watching, or more articulately what is made and how it is experienced. But similarly there is also an argument to be extended that, so long as the viewing mechanism is screen-based (with a subsequently fixed and finite border to the screen frame) then the Mise en scene as a functional and viable means of comprehension remains in tact. The cinema maker may employ all manner of contemporary cinematic constructs but the end result for the viewer remains the phenomenology of the experience, the engagement with how the cinema appears rather than how it is or how it was assembled. In coarse terms the viewer doesn’t care how the work was made, only how it is seems and there is legitimacy in the argument that no matter how the production process evolves the Mise en scene remains intact and functional so long as there is a screen with a finite frame for the cinematic work to play out on.
Here there are flaws that must be accounted for, flaws that demand alternate and divorced theoretical constructs for Production and Reception where Mise en scene cannot satisfy both.
Bordwell and Thompson articulate ‘Film Style’ as the “unified, developed and significant use of particular technical choices” (2001, p155). They construct a breakdown of ‘Film Form’ as comprised of two interacting systems; the Formal system shaped by Narrative, Categorical, Rhetorical, Abstract and Associational elements, and the Stylistic system shaped by, amongst other components, the Mise en scene and the camera. (p155)
In defining cinema in such a way Bordwell and Thompson enforce a direct (and in their view unbreakable) connection between Mise en scene and directorial intent; an assumption that the Mise en scene is the prism by which a director constructs cinema style. What will be argued in the following chapters is that the host of new digital cinema production tools, processes and mediums defy, dissolve or even dispense with the Mise en scene as a primary element of cinema production. Computer generated 3D environments circumvent the façade illusion of “Potemkin’s village” (Manovich 2001. p145) by composing space first and frame last. Layered compositing of unlimited image elements breaks down distinctions between montage and collage. The virtual camera drives new understandings of simulation and perspective outside of physical constraints. Machinima and real-time virtual environments break down divisions between animation and live-action – the photographic medium becomes an ‘option’ rather than a norm.
These are the new pillars of cinema production and they drive us to reconsider the painterly, theatrical and photographic basis for understanding cinema which underpins the Mise en scene. When these technologies that operate outside of the restrictive modality of the Mise en scene are at play in the hands of the cinema maker, Mise en scene as a theoretical framework ceases to be able to viably account for the choices a director makes. Mise en scene becomes solely connected to the phenomenology of the viewing experience, how the cinematic work appears but not for how it was built. As a result the assertion that cinema ‘style’ is intrinsically linked to Mise en scene choices becomes defunct. Mise en scene can account for what the production delivers but not for the production intent in constructing that phenomenological result.
Any theory is in essence merely a tool; a device for measurement, comparison and understanding. As such a theory is, in plain terms, useless if it is not useful. The following chapters will argue that whilst Mise en scene remains a viable and effective prism for analysis of cinema’s phenomenology, the Mise en scene construct is simply not useful for cinema makers. Mise en scene does not serve as a functional means of understanding cinema production or directorial intent. What is required is a more holistic framework focused on serving cinema makers, separate and apart from cinema analysts, and delivering a flexible and robust conceptual paradigm for the composition of cinema itself.
I will call this the Mise en space.
