Search The Internet Movie Database Enter the name of a movie, TV show, or person and then
click "Go" to get more information about it/them from
imdb.com.
Your own ego is the only trap that I think you can fall into. ~ Robert Altman
What is Mise en scene? The phrase refers to how scenes are framed and staged when appearing in a movie. That is, are the actors outside? Inside? What surrounds them? Does a certain shot through a doorway frame a character just so? In film theory, it is sometimes used as a way to 'pick apart' a movie and write about it.
Originally a French term that mean 'placing on stage,' the term is now used in film studies to designate how a particular scene is framed. For example, where things appear and what they're surrounded by can play a big part in how you receive a movie emotionally.
What is in and out of focus in a scene is also important in how a viewer reacts to a scene. Focus directs the viewer's eyes to different things that the director wants them to pay attention to in a particular scene.
Depth and scale of places and things - humans and objects - in a scene are sometimes manipulated by the filmmaker to subconsciously pass on a message. Using depth and scale, a director could point out, for instance, that an adversary is physically superior to the hero.
Decor - the set and props and how they are laid out helps set a mood, adding to whatever is trying to be communicated. That is, when it's done right. Bad decor (or out of place decor) can lead to horrible movies.
Lighting is also important when looking at a scene. There are three types of lighting used:
key lighting - From the front directed toward the object in the scene
fill lighting - Lighting from the opposite side of the key lighting, to balance the lighting out
back lighting - Lighting from behind the main object in the scene. Having light come from three different direction, you add to the illusion of three dimensions.
Low Key Lighting results in a dark and shadowy scene. On the other end of the spectrum, High Key Lighting floods the scene with a lot of light from the front - almost unnaturally so. Varying the back lighting also has an effect on how the scene comes across.
For production process I better send you to shows.vtheatre.net; I keep my notes for stage productions from the pre-production to the post-production cycles.
Andrey Tarkovsky: Sculpting in Time : Reflections on the Cinema Paperback: 254 pages *
Publisher: University of Texas Press; Reprint edition (April 1, 1989)
The idea behind the title of the book is that the film-goer goes to the cinema to experience time, and that the director's job is to sculpt the time that the audience experiences -- cut away the inessential words and seconds and pieces. This book is an introduction to the rules that Tarkovsky set for himself in achieving this goal.
I have pages with this title in several places: Theatre Director and in my new Virtual Theatre and in Ant Theatre & Film...
Why? First, because I direct, but more important -- nobody yet described what director does and doesn't do.
In Theatre Theory directory I even made a special page Directing in hope that I can explain the profession by the process. Listen to classical music (operas, too) and imagine that it's you who are composing that or this symphony... This is what you have to do with images, my friend.
And conduct it only once.
Maybe it's me, but like in writing I have to see, to hear it, to smell, to taste -- get as close as possible to touching it. I have to work on the image in my mind, even I see it, to find the way I can hear it (there is no silence, each silence has its own sound and melody, rhythm). So, I tourture myself staring onto the image (read about Tarkovsky and his films, of course, for training), I have to do it untill the smell comes. Now, see what produced the smell -- light, motion, color?
I keep my diaries (and booknotes), it helps. Nowadays I do writing only, the "old method" of filmmaking, when the reader makes movies in his or her head. You have to rework every images (sometimes it is several shot), because if you will make the "flow" -- this is what the public flies through. Of, course, they don't remember the shots and do not know how you constructed and designed them, but this is not what they should remember -- they should remember the FEELINGS they had!
Read the production pages and think twice do you want to be a film director?
Globalization and National Cinema, the American Age. Visual Culture
[ please read direct.vtheatre.net -- THR331 Stage Directing, if you want to know how direct action in front of the camera ]
What I shouldn't do as a director? Delegate! As much as you can. Remember where you began, remember the begining and the end of the process. The whole film is your business, not the the small things. Communicate -- if you have to get into everything, you are to lose the big picture!
Most important -- let actors act by creating the "set" of environments for them!
Mise-en-scene is a concept that was transposed from the theatre, where it meant that the director took into account everything that appeared on the stage; he took into account the effect of everything that appeared in the 'frame' of onstage space.
These elements had to further the purpose and function of the play. So too in film. Generally there is nothing in a film frame that is not meant to be there, that is not planned. So elements of the frame have a purpose in the act of constructing the meanings in a film.
Mise-en-scene are those elements that appear in the film frame as decided by the director. The term is theatrical and includes those elements associated with theatre: lighting, setting, costume, behaviour of actors.
Mise-en-scene includes everything we see and the construction of that.
Mise-en-scene is a strategy the filmmaker uses to create a world, a world of both space, time and narrative.
Mise-en-scene, the “placing of the scene”, is perhaps best defined as the creation of mood and ambience, though it more literally means the structuring of the film through camera placement and movement, blocking of action, direction of actors, etc. In other words, everything that takes place on the set prior to editing
Wide-screen encouraged the use of longer than average takes, and it seems clear that wide-screen processes created the functional grounds for a new film aesthetic based upon composition in width and depth, or mise-en-scene, rather than upon montage.
In this new aesthetic, the major emphasis would shift from editing to shooting, since the long take composed in width and depth is capable of containing a long-shot, medium shot, and close-up, action and reaction, within a single frame without resorting to fragmentation of the image.
The anamorphic frame show cause and effect in the same shot, whereas before a cut was used from cause to effect in the story.
The long take preserves the integrity of time and space by linking foreground, middleground and background within the same shot, whereas montage destroys it.
In
the long take close-up, the figure is close-up is temporally and spatially
linked with its environment by virtue of the shot’s mise-en-scene.
For
many early directors (Andre Bazin) this constitutes a more authentic
mode of representation than the dissociated close-up of montage.
Bazin insisted that the width and depth perspective created by the wide-screen long take offered the viewer a “democratic” and “creative” alternative to the manipulative process of montage.
The viewer of the long take can choose which actions or details to concentrate upon within a given shot, rather than have them pointed out to him/her by close-ups or be drawn to some inexorable conclusion through a montage sequence like Eisensteins’ massacre on the Odessa steps.
SIX ELEMENTS OF MISE-EN-SCENE
The six elements that
combine to construct mise-en-scene are these:
1. Setting
2. Costume and make-up
3. Lighting
4. Actor's expression and movement
5. Screen space
6. Time
Setting
In theatre, the character is all important. Rarely is the stage empty of characters. In film there are many scenes where the screen is empty of character and where that emptiness mobilises and moves the narrative. Can you think of any?
Filmmakers may use existing settings or construct them. To some, realism, or verisimilitude, is important. Historical accuracy can generally only be constructed; historical accuracy does not exist in existing locations.
Costume and make-up
Costume and make-up are fairly obvious examples of how the filmmaker controls events and stages the movement of the narrative, at the same time influencing the audience's understanding of events and attitudes. Both make-up and costume may aim for complete realism, or they may aim for complete fantasy, as in many horror and science fiction films. In these films the use of costume and make-up is designed to make real the unreal; it is to recreate a reality.
Lighting
In film lighting is one of the most powerful elements in mise-en-scene. Lighting makes us look in specific places. Lighting is textual in that it can create many images, many meanings.
Features of film lighting are quality, direction, source and colour.
Quality
Hard lighting from one
or more points creates shadows, and suggests harshness. Soft lighting suggests mellowness, although these aspects, like all these elements, never work on their own, but are always combined into a number of threads that have inter-relations with each other.
Direction
I've mentioned quality
above, in hard and soft lighting. But meanings are also constructed
by the direction of the light. Think about, and find out about, the
rattling of the threads of reality that occur when lighting comes from these directions: frontal lighting, sidelighting, backlighting, underlighting, top lighting. Think about the effects of these in any film you know or have seen recently.
Source
Three lights normally
used per shot, in conventional shots-key, fill, back-generally for each major actor in the shot. But these lights can be manipulated to create-along with other elements of film, meanings.
Colour
Colour is almost too obvious. In creating realism it is obviously useful. But in creating ambience, as in Birth of a Nation it is obviously useful as well. Here the colour is obtained through using a filter.
Actor's expression, position and movement
Why do actors stand where they do in a scene? Very often because positions in space relative to other people establish relationships between people.
Movement establishes and moves the narrative. From movement, as from all elements of mise-en-scene,
our intertextual threads awaken and we use these to make meanings, which change those threads we have in different arrangements to each other. Obviously this is one of the most powerful elements of mise-en-scene.
You may like to think about the impact of expression, position and movement by asking questions like `Why is she standing there?' `What effect does that have?' `Why is he playing the mouth organ? Why is she lying behind the other actor?'
Screen space
This is not location,
although it involves the location. Bordwell and Thompson suggest it
involves the organisation of shape, textures, and patterns of light
and dark. But more than this, in science fiction film screen space is often a fundamental element of the narrative. Space is an element that is constructed, that takes on character in film, for example, in Blade Runner. It is the construction of elements within a space, within a frame that is important.
Time
`Both the shot and our
viewing of it take place in time.'
CONCLUSION
I'll conclude by restating the importance and definition of mise-en-scene.
As a set of techniques,
mise-en-scene helps compose the film shot in space and time. Setting,
lighting, costume, and figure behaviour interact to create patterns
of colour and depth, line and shape, light and dark, and movements.
These patterns define and develop the space of the story world and emphasise salient story information. The director's use of mise-en-scene creates systems that not only guide our perception from moment to moment but also help to create the overall form of the film. [ source, reference -- URL? ]
* making movies *
