Adrian Martin 2014 Mise en Scene and Film Style FR
Adrian Martin 2014 Mise en Scene and Film Style FR
Adrian Martin 2014 Mise en Scene and Film Style FR
Adrian Martin’s book has a question not so much at its core but on its
periphery. How can we use the term mise en scène today when it has
become such an amorphous concept not only as a theoretical notion (what
exactly was mise en scène, even when thinking exclusively about cinema?),
but also as a practical reality in a world of multi-media? For example, does
an installation or a reality TV show have a mise en scène? In Martin’s own
words: ‘I do not believe that the cinema, as we have known it, is dead or
dying... my contention is at once more modest and more inclusive: that the
contemporary workings of dispositifs can offer us a new entrée into
rethinking the field of film aesthetics, in a way that mise en scène, on its
own, has not always invited or encouraged ─ especially whenever we
doggedly hold on to its purest and most classical definition’ (185).
I see the question as peripheral rather than central because Martin concludes
on the problem but doesn’t premise his book upon it. Instead he is more
interested in trying to explain what mise en scène is usually taken to mean,
and to talk up various mise en scène theorists whom he greatly admires.
Among these are V.F. Perkins, Robin Wood and Andrew Britton, as well as
others often working for Movie magazine in the 1960s. They also include
their contemporaries at Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif, such as Fereydoun
Hoveyda and Gérard Legrand. Martin even finds space to namecheck
Spanish-language writers, such as Catalan critic José Luis Guarner and
Cuban novelist and reviewer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Australian writers
are also mentioned: John Flaus, Ross Gibson and Lesley Stern, for example.
There has always been a certain type of inclusiveness in Martin’s criticism,
a sense that he doesn’t want to leave anyone out. When he says ‘my sense of
what is possible in film analysis and criticism, as it evolved throughout my
adult life, owes a great deal to tutelary figures in my local, Australian scene’
(xv), as he namechecks Gibson, Stern and so on, it is consistent with
numerous articles where he not only cites but cites admiringly. This is in
itself admirable, but it does sometimes leave us wondering if it is furthering
the point or acknowledging debts. Martin would say that the two aren’t
easily distinguished; part of the purpose here lies in saying that there are
people involved in mise en scène criticism too little known in academic and
critical discourse. ‘Therefore another aim of this book,’ he contends, ‘is to
give (at least, within the limits of the languages I can access) a sense of the
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perverse!’ (80). Godard also frequently cuts into his long takes too. Martin
observes the brief montage moments that suggest flashbacks, but which just
as easily seem to be outtakes from the very process of the film’s making:
‘test shots from before shooting properly began’ (81). This is Godard
simultaneously respecting and violating classic mise en scène, opening it up
to new possibilities whilst also acknowledging his masterful predecessors;
the film is indeed in part a homage to Minnelli’s Some Came Running
(USA, 1958), and Fritz Lang of course plays a version of himself as the
director of the film that Paul is writing and Prokosch producing.
How do you break open mise en scène? Two very different approaches are
the radically formalist and the socially acknowledged. The former involves
making the scene artificial, frontal and waxwork-like, as we find sometimes
in the work of Werner Schroeter and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or oddly
monumental as in the films of Pedro Costa, or off-key as in Manoel de
Oliveira and Eugène Green. Martin in this respect analyses a dinner scene in
Fassbinder’s Martha (West Germany, 1974), noticing that ‘the flowers are
not only ridiculously profuse (they often obscure our vision of the
characters), but also plastic’ (83). All the characters are laid out along a vast
dining table, as though on a stage or presenting themselves as a committee.
This is formalist mise en scène at its most pronounced, with the viewer
unlikely to believe in the scene as a piece of cinematic realism, but well able
to see Fassbinder’s ruthless need to show up a toxic bourgeois environment
where show is more important than communication. ‘Shame,
embarrassment and humiliation were Fassbinder’s stock-in-trade as a
dramatist,’ says Martin, ‘but they were not merely abstract or insubstantial
themes: he made them the basis of a very particular mise en scène system”
(85).
But what about the latter, social mise en scène? ‘With social mise en scène,’
Martin argues, ‘rather than going directly or primarily to the unique,
idiosyncratic sensibility or world-view of the maker, we attend to the newly
grasped raw material of social codes, their constant exposure and
deformation in the work of how a film articulates itself’ (134). Thus Richard
Linklater’s Before Sunrise (USA/Austria/ Switzerland, 1995) is a very
different work from Martha, since Linklater utilises a music store with a
listening booth to generate awkward intimacy between the film’s two main
characters. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) are crammed into
a tiny space listening to a folk ballad by Kath Bloom. A single take lasting
76 seconds plays fair by the social reality of the situation, while
cinematically working as a key scene of incremental intimacy. Martin
concludes: ‘this scene… offers us an awkward arrangement of bodies that
are positioned too closely, right next to each other in the un-spacious booth’
(135). Nobody watching the scene will think the moment is artificial; the
very point and purpose of Linklater’s sequence is to create a very plausible
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way in which Jesse and Céline can find themselves in a tight space where
intimacy seems likely. As Jesse looks at Céline, Céline looks elsewhere. As
Céline looks at Jesse, Jesse looks off to the right. It is a marvellous moment
of the desire to look and the need to look away, of being polite enough not
to stare and brave enough to acknowledge your feelings.
In this way, Fassbinder’s scene works through derealisation, Linklater’s
through verisimilitudinous recognition. It is as if much modern cinema has
dissolved classical mise en scène, which was often plausible rather than
realistic, into the implausible ‘excesses’ of a Fassbinder, and the realistic,
often intimiste cinema practised by Linklater. If we were to compare a
romantic comedy like The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, USA,
1940) to Before Sunrise, the former plays up the artificiality of the premise
within a plausible mise en scène that is hardly realistic; it is a thoroughly
studio-oriented recreation of Budapest, as both characters, Klara (Margaret
Sullavan) and Alfred (James Stewart), work in the same shop but get
involved in a letter exchange they think is with someone else, but which
turns out to be with each other. The latter, meanwhile, allows for a couple of
characters at a loose end to meet and wander around Vienna until dawn.
Obviously Linklater’s isn’t a film anybody could make; but it feels like it
could be. The Shop Around the Corner is a film only a studio could have
made.
Martin’s argument concerning modes of mise en scène is nuanced and
perhaps contradictory. When he talks of social mise en scène attending to
the world rather than to the filmmaker’s worldview, would there be a place
for Fassbinder, who seems more concerned with directorial vision than the
socially realistic? Martin thinks so, and talks of Fassbinder’s kinesics, or the
study of body language. ‘It is no exaggeration to claim that Fassbinder made
bodily turning one of the central elements in his audiovisual, mise en scène
syntax’ (139). But does this make it more pertinent to the body language of
the everyday, or the specific vision of the director? It can of course be both,
but where we might feel that John Cassavetes or Maurice Pialat fall into this
category of the analysis of micro-gestures within a loosely realist style,
Fassbinder seems quite different. If he possesses a kinesics, it is surely
contained by a cinematic approach that refuses the body its social
manifestation for its cinematic presentation. Claire Kaiser in a Companion
to Rainer Werner Fassbinder talks of the director’s negative kinesics: ‘[t]he
artificial and distanced acting underpinned by monotonous diction
characteristic of the early films reflects the mechanisation of existence’
(Kaiser 2012: 112). The key word here is ‘reflects’; in Linklater’s film the
actors more directly represent, seeming much less a product of Linklater’s
vision (even if they finally happen to be) than are Fassbinder’s actors a
product of his.
But what about mise en scène applied to television and art installations?
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Is this just high-mindedness on the part of this critic? Martin might think so,
since he sees a director like Michael Haneke as almost using a set of would-
be-elevated clichés when he condemns television: ‘[w]here a hallowed “art
cinema” figure such as Michael Haneke, in Benny’s Video
([Austria/Switzerland, ]1992) and Caché ([France/Austria/Germany/Italy,
]2005) takes a distanced, disapproving and melancholic view of
developments in popular media... plumbing for the well-worn alienation
thesis ─ the cultural theorist Bernard Stiegler... proposes, semi-
optimistically, a refashioning or remodelling of mental processes through
our interfaces with digital technology’ (165).
But there are ways in which we can admit significant advances in form,
without feeling obliged to absorb the crassest of content. Ladette to Lady
doesn’t have much to do with the fly-on-the-wall documentary techniques
popular in the 1970s, but neither do Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
(Alex Gibney, USA, 2005), Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris,
USA, 2008), Five Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi,
Israel/Palestine/France/Netherlands, 2011) or The Act of Killing (Joshua
Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and Anonymous, Denmark/Norway/UK,
2012). We can admire the latter documentaries without having to like
Ladette to Lady as well.
If we would wish for more differentiation and less comparison in relation to
television and film, then what about cinema and the installation? This is
where we return to our initial remark above about how to see the notion of
mise en scène through the broadest of parameters within image culture. Here
Martin adopts the term dispositif, an untranslatable word that he describes
‘in the simplest terms… [as] a game with rules, where the execution of the
game’s moves ─ the following of the rules ─ generates outcomes, results
and sometimes surprises’ (179). Whether it is a film or a video game, a
reality TV show or an installation, we could say that the dispositif generates
a much more open idea of mise en scène than a narrow cinematic notion.
This is an extremely useful way of looking at cinema within the world of
multimedia, where the former has lost its ontological status (most films are
shot now on digital, not on celluloid), and where it is constantly raided by
other media. This might take the form of games adapted from films like the
Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, USA, 1982) and Jaws (Steven Spielberg, USA,
1975), or installations including Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993)
and Five Year Drive By (1995), which utilises The Searchers (John Ford,
USA, 1956).
Martin then adds that ‘a dispositif is basically this: the arrangement of
diverse elements in such a way as to trigger, guide and organise a set of
actions’ (179). By seeing the dispositif as an audiovisual experience, we can
notice how games and installations are easily incorporated, no matter their
very different aims and purposes. Talking of Chantal Akerman’s installation
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Bibliography
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