Adrian Martin 2014 Mise en Scene and Film Style FR

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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015)

Review: Adrian Martin (2014) Mise en Scène and Film


Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 256pp.

Tony McKibbin, Independent Scholar

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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history and diversity of traditions in international film criticism, as it has


addressed matters of style in cinema’ (xv).
If the book isn’t quite predicated on the fascinating question with which it
concludes, then it does nevertheless work towards it. The early stages set up
mise en scène as a term that some have tried to pin down. David Bordwell
and Kristin Thompson, for example, paradoxically demand rigour while also
going with the flow: for Martin, ‘film scholars [like Bordwell and
Thompson]… use the term to signify the director’s control over what
appears in the film frame’ (14). Martin makes clear, however, that this does
not include ‘cutting or the camera movements, the dissolves, or offscreen
sound’ (14). Martin, meanwhile, wants to use the term with far more
conceptual freedom. He argues that ‘at least in fictional film, there is never
(or very rarely) a discrete, purely theatrical level in the actual practice of
filmmaking: everything that is designed, staged, lit, dressed and so forth, is
done with a particular vantage point, a particular angle, a concatenation of
various perspectives and angles ─ in mind’ (14). Martin finds this looser
definition more useful for showing how mise en scène has been transformed
over cinema’s history, especially in the post-1960s. After all, ‘the challenge
of composing any decent history of film style is to account for, and
accurately describe, its transformations’ (78).
A simple and classical notion of mise en scène would account for the fine
use of long takes in, for example, Vincente Minnelli’s films, Citizen Kane
(Orson Welles, USA, 1941), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (USA, 1948) and
Under Capricorn (USA, 1949). However, what happens when a director
like Jean-Luc Godard starts to utilise it? Martin contextualises Godard’s Le
Mépris/Contempt (France/Italy, 1963) as follows: ‘on the one side, the
classic era of mise en scène, especially as it had evolved with colour and
widescreen in the 1950s; and on the other side, the modernist era of which
Godard himself was such a prominent figurehead’ (79). Martin then
illustrates Godard’s play with classic mise en scène by analyzing a moment
of tension in the marriage between screenwriter Paul (Michel Piccoli) and
his wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot), and into which film producer Jeremy
Prokosch (Jack Palance) intrudes. As Martin describes the positioning of the
three characters, and the sort of marital crisis that Prokosch interrupts, he
goes on to say that ‘the closer we look at any Godard scene, the stranger its
details become ─ and the harder it becomes to cohere into the kind of
traditional mise en scène that allows for the [classical] type of psychological
reading’ (80). Martin notes that at this point in his career Godard was ‘both
mimicking the classical system, genuinely using it for expressive purposes
─ and also poking many holes in its surface, generating a myriad of in-scene
disturbances’ (80). The ‘framing strategies are frequently mischievous:
cutting off Palance at the waist works as an expressive moment, but blotting
out Bardot’s face with carefully placed tree branches seems simply

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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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Martin offers a parenthetical remark in analysing the sound design of


Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan, USA, 2008-2013): ‘Take note: I am not
playing the snob card here of Quality TV which is “cinematic” and hence
superior to run-of-the-mill TV; Breaking Bad is simply great TV and great
cinema at different levels, in one’ (123). Martin later proves that he is
indeed no snob when he compares Ladette to Lady (UK, 2005-2008) with
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/Salò, or the 120
Days of Sodom (Italy/France, 1975): ‘I remember the frisson I experienced
as a spectator, in passing from a viewing of Pasolini’s provocative Salò, or
the 120 Days of Sodom, to an episode of the UK series Ladette to Lady…
discovering that many key motifs (teenagers gathered in an isolated manor,
“re-education” often involving brutal humiliation, stark class differences),
were virtually identical from one to the other’ (167).
This lack of snobbery might allow Martin to see no dividing line between
film and television, thereby reaffirming his inclusiveness, but can it tell us
much about what passes for the aesthetic? That is, if earlier Martin has gone
into great descriptive detail to show how mise en scène is handled by
cinema’s masters, then, when he moves on to Big Brother (1999-), Loft
Story (2001-) and other reality TV shows, and makes comparisons between
these TV productions and Salò and La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, France,
1967), we might wish for more differentiation than comparison. Is it just
snobbery to think Godard and Pasolini’s films are of great aesthetic
importance and that reality TV shows pander to presumptions visual,
ideological and psychological? Interestingly, although Martin name-checks
Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, Denmark/Argentina/Spain/
Germany/Netherlands/Italy/USA/UK/France/Sweden/Finland/Iceland/
Norway, 2000) and Direktøren for det hele/The Boss of it All (Lars von
Trier, Denmark/Sweden/France/Italy/Germany/ Iceland, 2006), in
connection with von Trier and reality TV the most startling example would
be De udstillede/The Exhibited (Jesper Jargil, Denmark, 2000), a work that
properly combines cinema, television and installation work. Von Trier
wanted to see what would happen if you put 53 actors in 19 rooms in a
Copenhagen exhibition space and allowed their behaviour to be dictated by
the actions of New Mexican ants. The ants’ behaviour was broadcast live to
the Denmark installation, and lights would go off in the rooms, leading to
very diverse actions. This is Big Brother as radical conceit, directed on film
not by von Trier, but nonetheless showing all the mischievous sense of
enquiry that we would expect from the great Dane. It is as though von Trier
didn’t want to ape reality TV, but to show it up for the contrived world it
happened to be over the social experiment it tried to pass itself of as. It isn’t
that there are no similarities between King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese,
USA, 1983) and reality TV (to give another example Martin offers), but we
might also wish to know why there is a world of difference between them.

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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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piece Women from Antwerp in November (2008), Martin sees it as ‘a major


work on par, in terms of artistic achievement, with any of her greatest films.
It is a multi-screen piece that can be laid out in variable ways according to
the space’ (182). But this is exactly what we cannot do with an Akerman
film, nor for example with a film by Godard, whose major exhibition at the
Centre Pompidou in 2006 was a fragmentary account of Godard’s
imagination ─ an audiovisual work but not quite a film, and thus not easily
interchangeable with his cinematic oeuvre. Attending it one might think of
Chris Marker’s observation about his own CD-ROM work: ‘Godard nailed
it once and for all: at the cinema, you raise your eyes to the screen; in front
of the television, you lower them. Then there is the role of the shutter. Out
of the two hours you spend in a movie theatre, you spend one of them in the
dark. It's this nocturnal portion that stays with us, that fixes our memory of a
film in a different way than the same film seen on television or on a
monitor’ (Douhaire and Rivoire 2003).
Martin’s book is ambitious and ranging, but so many statements seem to beg
questions rather than answer them. Are there really so many similarities
between Ladette to Lady and Salò? Between an Akerman film and an
Akerman installation? Is Haneke really doing no more than peddling a well-
worn alienation thesis? Often Martin settles for an exclamation mark as an
argumentative clincher: ‘how [Ritwik] Ghatak loves his ellipses!’ (208);
‘Godard the techno DJ, well before his time!’ (81); ‘tell that to David
Lynch!’ (109). Or he will offer a comparison that relies on cinematic
authority: ‘worthy of Frank Tashlin’ (203), ‘worthy of Jean Renoir’ (203).
There are references galore here, showing Martin’s very healthy cinephilia,
but one of the dangers of the cinephilic references is that they can derail
arguments that need more focus and fewer examples. Where numerous
theorists move in the other direction and offer apparently strong arguments
none too hampered with examples that might contradict their throughline,
Martin’s book has a scattered bent that could leave the reader wondering
quite what the point happens to be.
Nevertheless this makes Mise en Scène and Film Style very far from
irrelevant, as buried in it is an important question about where cinema is
going and what it ought to be in the twenty first century after a hundred
years of knowing more or less what it was. When Martin says ‘in my
experience of reality TV, nothing could ever beat [the spoof] My Big Fat
Obnoxious Boss [2004-2005]’ (172), we might wonder if this is a direction
we are in favour of defending. Surely Haneke’s work is still a lot more
important than that, and one can’t help but feel that if Martin often falls
back on taste as an argumentative tool, then this would be one instance
where many cinephiles would be unlikely to concur. In leaving us begging
questions and begging to differ, Martin has produced a book that keeps
addressing important queries, but we might wish for another tome to move

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some way towards answering them.

Bibliography

Douhaire, Samuel, and Annick Rivoire (2003) ‘Marker Direct: An Interview


with Chris Marker’ Film Comment, http://www.filmcomment.com/
article/marker-direct-an-interview-with-chris-marker/. Accessed 10
September 2015. Originally published in Libération, 5 March 2003.
Kaiser, Claire (2012) 'Exposed Bodies, Evacuated Identities' in Brigitte
Peucker (ed.), A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 101-117.

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