Saturday, February 04, 2006
Mise-en-scene Activities
Some of you may have seen the opening shot to Ferris Bueller's Day Off. To give us information about the film's main character, even before we see him, the camera pans and tracks, showing us Ferris' bedroom. We see all kinds of stuff, and this stuff is arranged in telling ways.
There's a similar shot in Silence of the Lambs, when Clarice Starling
(Jody Foster) inspects items in the bedroom of a murdered girl.
The point: We notice that character (what we might label "personality" in real life) is constructed through elements of the mise en scene: in this case, out of the collage of stuff that the set designer arranged for the camera. We in the audience create or, better, we project a personality onto the screen based on what we see (and also by what we do not see). If you call this process of generalization "stereotyping," you are right.
The fact is, without culturally shared stereotypes, films probably wouldn't make sense to us. And I should add, such stereotyping is a lot more subtle than assuming that if a cowboy is wearing a white outfit, he must be the hero. There are students, right now in High School, who can and do size up people in seconds based on, say, the shoes that they wear or by the way t-shirts hang on bodies.
Project:
(Work in small groups of no more than 3 students)
Tackle the following assignment as a way to experiment with mise en scene. Choose a character, any character. He or she can be "real" or "invented." S/he could be a student (of any age), a business person (any job), a criminal (any sort), an alien (any nationality or species). And then, try out the role of set designer.
Your task is to make a very detailed description of this character's bedroom. You can do this in the form of a list, an inventory of the stuff you'd bring onto the set and arrange for the camera. However, Ultimately you want to create a diagram (poster) or 3D Model of the bedroom.
Pretend that we in the film crew have to be able to shoot this room using your instructions, your list. And we have to be certain that the film audience will have a certain sense of the inhabitant's personality. In effect, it's your job to construct a personality for the film's character through staging. In other words, we want the audience to feel like they anticipated the character's personality, even though they actually invented this personality (granted, with a lot of help from you).
Note: We're not hiring a star who brings to the film a whole set of personality traits acquired from other films and through stories found in the media. (Or think of this point: Stars allow directors to get by with less exposition. Why? Because the audience feels that it already knows them, even if it has never actually met the star.)
Got it? Use this project to give viewers a complete inventory or an in-depth description of a bedroom--list or paragraphs, your choice. Do not--that's do not--tell us anything about the character that inhabits this room. For example, don't say, "This is the room of a kindergarten student, a girl, living in a town somewhere in central Pennsylvania. Her mother is a real estate agent; her father is a civil engineer." I would like for your classmates to guess the character you've invented based on what you give us. In other words, I want you to approach the work of your classmates inductively--like detectives, scientists, and FBI agents. Finally, do be as subtle and as stereotypical as the films you're used to seeing (there's a tension here). Bad guys aren't just bad guys in the films we love. They're bad, sure, and we know that, but they often have personality traits that make them "three dimensional."
What is mise en scène?
Mise en scène is the starting point for analysis of ‘film as film’ (the title of a ‘classic’ introduction to film analysis, Perkins 1993) as distinct from film in its social context. First used by critics in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, an influential French film journal, in the 1950s, mise en scène focuses on what can be seen in the picture. Clearly what can be seen (unless we are dealing with computer generated imagery) must exist before it can be filmed; this is the pro-filmic event. Usually this event will consist of actors performing in a setting; the point of view from which audiences see this is wholly determined by the position of the camera. The film’s director usually decides where the camera is positioned.
For some critics this pro-filmic event defines mise en scène. For example, in the first edition of another classic text, Film Art (2004), David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson state that mise en scène consists of setting, lighting, costume and figure expression and movement (that is behaviour and movement in the scene); they consider camera placement (framing) in a separate chapter. Bruce Kawin’s definition (1992), however, also includes:
choice of filmstock (black-and-white or color, fine-grain or grainy) . . . aspect ratio (the proportion of the screen) . . . framing (how much of the set or cast will be shown at a time) . . . camera placement and movement, and . . . sound environment. (Kawin, 1992, p. 98)
Kawin is unusual in including sound; however, there seems little point in divorcing sound produced in the narrative world from what’s producing it. This is a question of definition and it matters little, when analysing film, whether you consider camera positioning and/or sound as part of mise en scène or not as long as you do consider all the elements. Kawin’s inclusion of camera placement transforms the way audiences see the pro-filmic event and camera movement changes the way we see the pro-filmic space, which draws attention to itself and is split between what is ‘in the picture’ and how the camera is transforming what we see. Filmstock, too, can alter the look of the scene; however, it is exterior to it. Therefore we shall consider movement and filmstock separately from mise en scène.
Therefore, mise en scène consists of:
• Production Design: sets, props and costumes
• Colour (present in both production design and lighting)
• Lighting• Actors’ performance (including casting and make up) and movement (blocking)
• Framing including position; depth of field; aspect ratio; height and angle (but not movement)
• Diegetic sound (that is, sound that emanates from the scene and is not extraneous to it, such as the music that is not being played within the scene or a voice-over)
Films with good examples of mise en scène
The Sixth Sense: Opening Scene (US, 1999).
The film's main character, Cole wears normal little boy clothing, sweaters and pants.
Malcolm (Bruce Willis) wears the same outfit (the one he was wearing the night he was shot) throughout the entire movie. Red in our culture is a symbol of blood, and hence, death. Most of the color in the film is very muted and dull. It is used to underscore important links to the supernatural. The lighting of the film is very dim and dull, and most of the film takes place at night or inside a building.
• What does the sequence mean to you?
• How does it create that meaning?
Opening sequences are obviously good to use as no assumptions are made about an audience’s understanding. The Sixth Sense is useful in helping to understand mise en scène as the first shot is a close-up of a reddish light bulb, and the audience is unaware that red is significant throughout the film.
Production Design: sets, props and costumes
The Thirteenth Floor (US, 1999) – its ‘1930s’ setting, in the opening sequence, draws attention to the design.
Colour (present in both production design and lighting)
