Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 20, June 2004
Adrian Martin
Placing *Mise en scène*:
An Argument with John Gibbs's _Mise-en-scène_
John Gibbs _Mise-en-scène:
Film Style and Interpretation_ London and New York:
Wallflower
Press,
2002 ISBN 190336406X 128 pp. In 1967 André S.
Labarthe wrote a one page *billet* or opinion piece in
_Cahiers du cinéma_ titled 'Mort d'un mot' ('Death of
a Word'). [1] The word or term in question was *mise
en scène*. In this short but dense piece of
argumentation, Labarthe makes a number of moves: -- He places *mise en
scène* as a term that 'symbolises well a substantial
history of cinematic art . . . effectively applied, with
equal ease' to films 'from _L'Arroseur arrosé_ . . .
to the latest Otto Preminger'. Its domain is what is 'beyond
the subject' of a film -- i.e. how that subject is rendered
or treated by way of the film's form or style. -- He summarises *mise en
scène* analysis as a well-established protocol in
film criticism: 'Since [Louis] Delluc, to judge a
film is *always* to judge the performance of the actors, the
quality of the dialogue, the beauty of the photography, the
efficacy of the montage . . .'. -- He suggests that such a
mode of criticism has scarcely evolved 'for thirty or forty
years' (thus returning us to 1937 or 1927!), or rather that,
if it has evolved, it has done so 'only inside a domain
defined by the concept of *mise en
scène*'. -- He suggests (and this
is the central polemical thrust of his piece) that there has
developed a newer kind of cinema which can no longer be
discussed in terms of *mise en scène*, and hence is
accounted for badly or not at all by critics ('I say that we
still don't have, today in 1967, a *just* dialogue between
criticism and the films of Godard'). -- He considers the
response of _Cahiers_ (with its will to encompass this new
cinema) to the problem of time-lag in the domain of
conceptual and critical language. In his (insider's) view,
_Cahiers_ was trying valiantly to adjust the term of *mise
en scène* (with which it had been principally
associated in the '50s) to new circumstances -- explaining,
for instance, that *mise en scène* is not only
rendering, *merde alors*, but also ideas; not only
premeditation and ruse, but also collage and chance; not
only the staggering shot along the streets in _Touch of
Evil_, but also those shots 'chucked with a trowel' that
Chabrol talks about in relation to some Aldrich film or
other; not only the extraordinary performance of Katharine
Hepburn in _The Philadelphia Story_, but also the pathetic
apparitions of these documentary heroes incarnated by
Jean-Pierre Léaud in films by Truffaut, Godard,
Eustache and Skolimowski; in short, that *mise en
scène* is not only *mise en scène*, but also
the contrary of what was conceived of in the wake of
Delluc. Given these contortions on
the part of _Cahiers_, Labarthe persuasively asks: 'What is
the use of this term that we must ceaselessly explain,
ceaselessly reupholster with circumstantial clarifications,
according to the films and the auteurs?' He thus recommends
that the term be abandoned, or rather grasped as the name of
a classical practice of cinema that is, in 1967, outmoded.
He ends by calling for concepts from elsewhere, 'living
domains like advertising, cybernetics, even painting,
sculpture and music', and encouraging attentiveness to this
new cinema: 'Come on, open your eyes: the cinema has moved
on. Don't try any longer to hold it down. Chase
it!' This episode in the
history of French criticism is recounted and contextualised
in Antoine de Baecque's important recent book _La
Cinéphilie. Invention d'un regard, histoire d'une
culture 1944-1968_. De Baecque vividly sketches what was at
stake at that historical, mid '60s moment: not only
editorial control of _Cahiers_, torn as it was between
classicists (led by Eric Rohmer) and modernists (led by
Jacques Rivette), but also the broader challenge of the
innovative forms of cinema emerging from many countries at
once, in a dizzying progression of new waves: France,
Brazil, Poland, Japan, Germany, Czechoslovakia . . .
[2] This moment in the history
of film, and the challenge it issued in relation to the
available tools of film criticism, has largely been lost,
forgotten. *Mise en scène* criticism goes on much as
it did before the '60s, in virtually the exact terms
circumscribed by Labarthe. As bizarre, exaggerated, or
purely polemical as it may seem to assert, I believe
Labarthe's point is still absolutely valid: I say that we
still don't have, today in 2004, a just dialogue between
criticism and the films of Godard. And Godard is only the
tip of the iceberg of everything that began in the
'60s. Reading John Gibbs's
excellent _Mise-en-scène: Film Style and
Interpretation_, it is not hard to form the impression of a
critical practice still lolling in the sophisticated
pleasures of _The Philadelphia Story_ and _Touch of Evil_,
and not moving much beyond that golden age of Hollywood
classicism at its most refined and complex (as in the work
of Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, or Vincente Minnelli, or
beyond Hollywood in Max Ophuls and Michael Powell), except
when it can plausibly find the continuation of that
tradition (for example, in the films of Bertrand Tavernier
or Zhang Yimou). Because it is so good at
what it does, and so astute within the limits it sets for
itself, _Mise-en-scène: Film Style and
Interpretation_ is a book worth arguing with. It stands
proudly -- even to the point of some myopia -- with the
tradition of criticism associated with _Movie_ in Britain (a
tradition, I hasten to add, that I regard with very high
respect). Few film books are as staunchly British as this
one: beyond some references to André Bazin,
_Cahiers_, William Rothman, and a few select others, this
text essentially suggests a critical history that begins in
the pages of _Oxford Opinion_ in the late '50s (in reaction
to methods entrenched in _Sight and Sound_ and _Sequence_)
and travels across the seas to Canada's _CineAction!_
today. So there is nothing French
beyond _Cahiers_, such as _Positif_, or the remarkable
collection _La mise en scène_ under the direction of
Jacques Aumont; [3] and nothing from Germany or
Australia or Japan or any other film culture which has
produced substantial and important work on *mise en
scène*. [4] Gibbs, like any of us, is limited
by linguistic capability; all the same, I think even a
short, introductory text such as this could have given a
more comprehensive sense of the international history of the
concept and the shifting debates it has
occasioned. There is, above all, a
lacuna at the heart of this book, and it is precisely the
challenge of the '60s which Labarthe pinpointed (being
dependent on the available English translations from
_Cahiers_, Gibbs seems unaware of this crucial intervention,
as well as similar material from the period). There are several sorts of
problems I have with Gibbs's presentation of *mise en
scène*. Almost inevitably, there are definitional
problems, arising in part from Gibbs's attachment to a
fairly narrow patch of critical writing within the single,
_Movie_-led tradition. And then, more seriously, there are
historical problems in relation to the cinema's development
(through modernism and postmodernism) and the capacity of
*mise en scène* as adumbrated to account for key,
aesthetic changes within that period. Rather than
painstakingly lay out all of these issues and their historic
variables, I will proceed, in this short article, by a
single cinema snapshot -- in the hope of giving some sense
of where *mise en scène*, as a cinematic practice,
might be these days, and how far *mise en scène*, as
a critical practice, is falling rather short of
it. But first, the
definitional issues. Gibbs, it seems to me, never frontally
tackles, let alone tries to resolve, the foundational
ambiguity that has long haunted *mise en scène*
criticism. Namely: does it indicate a quite specific phase
in the filmmaking process -- which would be the shooting or
'principal photography' phase, in which the scenes are
blocked and shot within the décor -- or is it a
looser term, a metaphor almost, for film *style* taken more
broadly and holistically? If it's the former, then the
definition of *mise en scène* must be meaningfully
limited and not allowed to 'bleed' over other phases of the
filmmaking process; and if it's the latter, then is the
displacement of the word style by *mise en scène*
blocking our full appreciation of the complex levels of
aesthetic form in cinema? This is what I believe has indeed
happened in many places where film criticism is
practiced. The reasons why the moment
of shooting has become a kind of fetish to *mise en
scène* critics and analysts -- especially of the
auteurist variety, and I am an unapologetic auteurist myself
-- are multiple and not quickly disentangled. Suffice it to
say here that, especially within the classical Hollywood
context, shooting often appealed (rather mythically) to
critics as the bedrock, almost existential moment of
*freedom* in a director's art, no matter what was being
imposed on the auteur before (studio-approved script) or
after (studio-enforced edit). If *mise en scène*
in this sense is taken as the essence of film art, and of
the auteur's 'gesture', it enshrines the three-point diagram
with which Bernardo Bertolucci paid fond homage to Sergio
Leone and, behind him, a vast tradition of 'organic' cinema:
what matters, fundamentally, is that mobile, modulating,
sinuous relationship between the camera, the actor, and the
environment (whether natural or constructed). [5]
And do not doubt it: when that organic moment of *mise en
scène* happens with absolute grace and expressive
perfection before your eyes in a film by Mizoguchi or
Minnelli or Rivette, it is magic -- one of the primal
pleasures of cinema, and a great generator of its sensorial
and semantic riches. But, but, but . . . Gibbs
immortalises a very early text by Robin Wood which, in a
great outpouring of rhetorical enthusiasm, posits *mise en
scène* as the catch-all for every notable aesthetic
aspect of cinema -- ending with the flourish, via Jacques
Doniol-Valcroze, that *mise en scène* is 'quite
simply . . . 'the organization of time and space'' (56-7).
Gibbs is cautious enough to present this passage as 'neither
the first or [sic] the last word on the subject',
but he ends up siding with Wood's tendency (in this
instance) to present *mise en scène* as 'almost
synonymous with direction' -- especially as it cues what
Gibbs calls the '*transformative* affect of film style . . .
it is by means of the mise-en-scène that the director
turns a script into a film' (59). But, strictly speaking,
time and space -- not to mention dramaturgy, rhythm, and the
overall architectonic form of a film -- can only in a very
limited way be determined by *mise en scène*. One can
wonder (and this is a niggling flaw in much film analysis)
whether *mise en scène* wholly determines even 'the
image' in its pristine, pictorial-theatrical state. For what
comes out of the camera is still only raw material: for
colour-grading and occasional reframing in the old days, and
these days extremely elaborate digital processes which often
do far more to patch together a collage-like image than what
any one single camera 'captures' or delivers. Now to the challenge of
film history, and the moment in that history when classical
*mise en scène* itself becomes something which can be
referenced, cited, evoked -- and also, thereby, bracketed,
problematised, and merrily interfered with. In Godard's _Contempt_
(1963), there is an early scene, set in a villa's garden,
that encapsulates the feel of this film as one that sits
nervously but cagily astride eras -- on the one side, the
classical era, and on the other side, the modernist era. It
is a scene devoted to the first, mysterious rift in the
marriage between Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and Paul (Michel
Piccoli). It is a scene about emotional distance, and to
that end Godard adopts, magisterially, the *mise en
scène* language he learnt watching and studying the
great classical films -- those of Minnelli, Mizoguchi,
Murnau, Renoir, Hitchcock, and so many others. This is a
pictorial and staging code which precisely hinges on
frame-diagrams of near and far, close and distant, in a
constant, dynamic modulation of 'bodies in
space'. Throughout this scene of
_Contempt_ (Chapter 5 on the superb Criterion DVD release),
the shots of Camille alone, static, at a distance
(accompanied by Georges Delerue's plangent score) powerfully
evoke the emotional abyss between the characters, especially
when we feel these shots to be from Paul's viewpoint. In a
fine piece of theatrical, three-shot, wide-screen staging
that would make any classicist proud, Godard devotes a
portion of the scene to Paul's increasingly unconfident
explanation of why he was late for this appointment --
fighting as he is to keep the attention of the brutish
American producer Prokosch (who sits, withdrawing behind his
sunglasses and drink) and Camille (who exits the frame in
supreme indifference). But there are also, along
these triumphs of a mastered *mise en scène*
language, many perturbations of the classical schema in this
scene. Its second shot, which seems to begin as Paul's POV
cruise around Camille, ends with an abrupt look by her
somewhere beyond the frame -- cueing a cut which shows Paul
nowhere near his supposed viewpoint. Already, something else
is going in this play of 'regards', something
quintessentially modern in the post-war cinema inaugurated
by Rossellini, Antonioni, and others: the look of Godard the
auteur, or the film itself as a narrating (and desiring)
agency, intervening ostentatiously in the staging of the
scene. In the second phase of the
scene -- which proceeds, with deliberate jerkiness and
irresolution, through three repetitions of pretty much the
same disaffected interaction, rather than employing a
dramatic 'arc' development -- Camille walks off and then
stops. With her back still turned, the camera begins another
'unmotivated' movement towards her -- this time triggering a
brief and disconcerting montage flurry of shots taken from
all over the film (so disconcerting it has been snipped from
some still-circulating prints). Terms like flashback or
flashforward prove useless to describe this interruption, or
circumscribe it within one character or another's subjective
experience. And by now the pattern of the music has become
noticeably odd: it comes on and off full-blast, with
scarcely any conventional fading modulation. Even more
remarkable on this soundtrack is an astonishing example of
Godard's radical sound-editing and its brash manipulation of
the 'given' musical score, which he likes to treat like an
aural found-object: with the first images of the montage the
music itself is dragged back a few beats and then violently
re-started. Godard the techno DJ before his time! By the third phase of the
scene the compositions and staging are becoming increasingly
strange. There is a 'redundant' cut from one angle on
Camille sitting on a bench to another -- except that, until
the camera jokingly nudges itself over, this second shot
obscures the star's face behind a tree branch. To continue
this sense of a *mise en scène* now internally
discombobulated between the staging and the camera angle --
what Alain Bergala describes as Godard's 'other side of the
bouquet' technique [6] -- we are treated to a frame
that cuts Prokosch off at the waist as he hesitates before
Camille (itself a wonderfully expressive bit of direction),
and into which Paul must clumsily bend down to speak with
his wife (also expressive of his increasing sense of awkward
belittlement). And then comes a second montage flurry, more
mysterious than the first in its speed and variety of views
-- and serving, in its Eisensteinian graphic-matches on
movement, to abruptly 'bump' the filmic narration back to
Paul and his trajectory, which is where this scene
began. Reading Raymond Bellour's
essay that sets out to critique and extend *mise en
scène* as a concept -- in the process generating its
own montage-flurry of bewilderingly new but useful terms
like *mise en pages*, *mise en phrases*, and *mise en
images* [7] -- I was struck by a simple but deadly
limitation of *mise en scène* as a classical tool:
its dependence on continuity within a scene. Continuity is a
fundamental ground-rule of classical *mise en scène*,
however much it might be subtly 'cheated' on set or in the
editing room: if the scene doesn't 'flow' seamlessly -- and
if the work of style is not 'invisible' or at least
constrained to this extent -- then none of the careful
modulations of movement, gesture, 'regard', and so on, can
take place. But how much cinema, now
or ever, relies on this code of continuity? Certainly not
_Contempt_. Of course, there are sublimely classical
directors still working today, like Clint Eastwood. Scorsese
is right on the trembling edge of the classical style: there
is just enough of a shred of continuity left before the
scene splinters into a modernist chaos. But look back, for
instance, at the Benagli master Ritwik Ghatak. His
magnificent _The Cloud-Capped Star_ (1960) -- 'walked
through' from start to end by Bellour in another text
[8] -- combines an astonishingly rich repertory of
*mise en scène* staging with, at every cut, a truly
(and explicitly) Eisensteinian sense of rupture,
juxtaposition, 'graphic switches' between diagonal
formations, and so on. We would be better suited, in this
case, taking our cues from Raymond Durgnat's 'mixed mode'
analyses of King Vidor (one of those key figures, like
Ulmer, straining at and frequently bursting the borders of
classicism, as much through innate, liberating vulgarity as
through experimental impulse) than from the (rightly
classic) text venerated by Gibbs, V. F. Perkins's _Film as
Film_. [9] On the topic of Perkins and _Movie_, a
passage in a 1975 discussion between that magazine's editors
is revealing. In this text, Jim Hiller stands up for modern
cinema (he went on to write about Jon Jost in a subsequent
issue) while Perkins reminds us of the tenets of
classicism: JH: *mise en scène*
is primarily, surely, a descriptive term for something which
can't *not* exist. VFP: That depends on what
you take it to mean . . . the things my view of *mise en
scène* has supremely do with are performance and
décor, the spatial disposition of people in relation
to their environment. [10] But to truly take the
measure of a modernist (and beyond) cinema, we have to
explore terms from Eisenstein and Bellour like *interstice*
or *interval* that have long been lost in *mise en
scène* criticism. That is to say, more simply, that
*mise en scène* analysis needs a reunion with
theories of *montage* (long left fallow in Anglo-American
cinema studies, though not elsewhere) -- or, at the very
least, *découpage* ('shot breakdown',
shot-patterning), an intermediate term between *mise en
scène* and montage that was once strongly alive in
the writings of Noël Burch and Brian Henderson, and
informs the regular reviewing of Jonathan Rosenbaum. And
*decoupage*, pushed a little further back to its origin,
returns us to an often censored element in *mise en
scène* criticism: namely, the script! It is no wonder there are
so many missed encounters down the decades between the film
industry and cinephiles, when the former often pushes
how-to-write-a-script wisdom without the slightest attention
to film style (one recent manual even seriously advises
budding screenwriters to *not* study finished films, only
their published scripts), while the latter occasionally
extol style in a perfect vacuum completely divorced from the
*cinematic* possibilities already inherent and foreseen in
the writing. To today read Henderson's
1971 speculation on the 'intrasequence cut' in Ophuls,
Murnau, and Mizoguchi [11] -- he also called it
'*mise en scène* cutting', which can strike us as a
delightful or disturbing contradiction in terms -- is enough
to put into relief a typical film culture fetish arising
from the mistiest excess of *mise en scène*
adoration. I am speaking of the glorification of the *long
take* (Béla Tarr and Hou Hsiao-hsien, take a bow): as
if this incontestable, almost manic 'organization of time
and space' by the director -- second by grinding second and
step by heavy step -- stands, in its extremity, as the
pinnacle or apotheosis of creative film art. The fact is
that long takes are astonishingly difficult for any
flesh-and-blood filmmaker to pull off (I don't simply mean
this technically), and they flop far more often than they
fire on any aesthetic and dramaturgical level. The long take, like every
aspect of *mise en scène* properly speaking, must be
placed -- as Noël Burch indicated way back in the midst
of the '60s revolution [12] -- into a *dialectical*
relationship with every other distinct level of film style.
This is a relationship in which not only organic fullness
but also corrosive 'lack' is at work -- just as we
experience it whenever Wong Kar-Wai begins 'treating' and
mixing his beautifully staged images (and their speeds) via
various plastic manipulations; or when Alain Resnais takes
us, with a tracking shot or a mere flick-pan, between or
through different levels and registers of reality dwelling
inside the same shot in _Hiroshima, non amour_ (1959) and
_Mélo_ (1986); or when Chantal Akerman and Tsai
Ming-liang create unbearably charged 'diagonals' in their
stagings that link tensely static characters and/or objects
in the frame, but diagonals that are rarely 'bridged' via
physical movement -- thus creating a *virtual* or imaginary
*mise en scène* of *possible* movements and
connections that only the spectator's mental and emotional
activity can supply. John Gibbs's book is very
far from being a eulogy to the sloppily heroic long take. In
his careful and detailed analyses, he takes us through many
crucial 'moves' -- of gesture, camera placement, spatial
relations, and cutting -- that create thematic meaning in
scenes from films including Sayles's _Lone Star_ (1996) and
Sirk's _Imitation of Life_ (1958). The book is worth buying,
devouring, and savouring for these analyses alone. But one
wonders how he would fare trying to apply his tools to a
compacted, multi-scene sequence from Skolimowski, Makavejev,
Ferrara, De Oliveira, or almost any branch of the
avant-garde. *mise en scène* does not disappear in
any of these filmic practices; but it evolves, sometimes
violently, and the English-language classical tradition of
*mise en scène* criticism has yet to face the force
of that evolution, or the complexity of its modern
history. Victoria,
Australia Notes 1. André Labarthe,
'Mort d'un mot', _Cahiers du cinéma_, no. 195,
November 1967, p. 66. 2. Antoine de Baecque, _La
Cinéphilie. Invention d'un regard, histoire d'une
culture 1944-1968_ (Paris: Fayard, 2003), pp.
341-2. 3. Jacques Aumont, ed.,
_La mise en scène_ (Brussels: De Boeck,
2000). 4. I merely mention here,
among many others: the critics associated in the '60s and
'70s with the German magazine _Filmkritik_, such as Frieda
Grafe and Harun Farocki; Shigehiko Hasumi, the teacher and
writer who has influenced an entire generation of
contemporary Japanese filmmakers; and the texts collected in
_Film -- Matters of Style_ (Perth: Continuum,
1992). 5. Bernardo Bertolucci,
'Once Upon a Time in Italy', _Film Comment_, July-August
1989, p. 78. 6. Alain Bergala, 'The
Other Side of the Bouquet', in Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea
Bandy, eds, _Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image_ (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 57-74. 7. Raymond Bellour,
'Figures aux allures de plans', in Aumont, ed., _La Mise en
scène_, pp. 109-126. 8. Raymond Bellour, 'The
Film We Accompany', _Rouge_, no. 3, May 2004
<http://www.rouge.com.au>. 9. Raymond Durgnat and
Scott Simmon, _King Vidor, American_ (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988); V. F. Perkins, _Film as Film_
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 10. Ian Cameron, et al,
'_Movie_ Discussion', _Movie_, no. 20, Spring 1975, p.
7. 11. Brian Henderson, _A
Critique of Film Theory_ (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980), pp.
48-61. 12. Noël Burch,
_Theory of Film Practice_ (London: Secker and Warburg,
1973). Copyright © Adrian
Martin, May 2004 Adrian Martin, 'Placing
*Mise en scene*: An Argument with John Gibbs's
_Mise-en-scene_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 20, June
2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n20martin>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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