FILM Mise-en-scène Analysis

Mise-en-scène Analysis

15

Essential Points

A Slideshare presentation. 33 slides with graphics. Good for revision. At the bottom a transcription of the text. Other film related interesting slideshows at the side.

FILM BOOK Montage, Découpage, Mise en Scène: Essays on Film Form

Montage, Découpage, Mise en Scène: Essays on Film Form



Jacques Aumont, Timothy Barnard, Frank Kessler with a foreword by Christian Keathley


This book is to be published by caboose in a series called Kino-Agora [Series editor: Christian Keathley, Middlebury College]

FILM montage / découpage / mise-en-scène V

After reading the Christian Keathley paper Catherine put up on FSFF about découpage [Bonjour Tristesse and the expressive potential of découpage ] can see that the title of my original post on découpage should really be montage, découpage and mise-en-scène. But then I didn’t really understand the connections before. This is a learning experience!

Looking around for découpage vs. mise-en-scéne has brought a few more explanations.

Useful:

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 découpage, pushed a little further back to its origin, returns us to an often censored element in *mise en scène* criticism: namely, the script!

from


Placing Mise en scène: An Argument with John Gibbs’s Mise-en-scène


by Adrian Martin in Film-Philosophy Journal, vol. 8 no. 20, June 2004


Buried in the middle of Romance of the Ordinary [on Chantal Akerman], Jonathan Rosenbaum’s post on Belgian film-maker Chantal Ackerman, is a section on découpage and mise-en-scéne. And in the middle of that:

….découpage. In terms of its popular French usage, it has three separate but interlocking meanings: the final form of a script, the breakdown of a film into separate shots and sequences prior to filming, and the basic structure of a finished film. (The verb découper means “to cut out” or “to cut up.”) The term découpage implies that there is a continuity between script and editing — a continuity imposed not by a writer, director, or editor, but by a filmmaker who carries the project through from beginning to end — and that mise en scène becomes a means toward an end in this continuity rather than an end in itself.

Right after that, this paragraph:

If the term mise en scène implies an industrial model of cinema, the term découpage implies an artistic or artisanal model. The latter term makes sense in France, where a filmmaker’s right to final cut is a part of actual law; it makes very little sense in a country like ours, where even the writer-directors who have an unusual amount of creative freedom — Woody Allen, for instance — do not produce a découpage in the sense that Robert Bresson does. (As we know from Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen’s book When the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins, practically all of Allen’s features are restructured and re-created in the cutting room, and the original scripts are quite different from the finished products.)

It’s all over the place. This from a Criterion Forum, What does a cinematographer do? :

Mise en scène began life as a generic term in French cinema in the 20s and 30s to generally indicate the director – “mise en scène de…” The term gained greater force of meaning with the post war critics, and of course the famous Politique des Auteurs. In fact, a distinction grew up between directors whose mise en scene (to cut it short “means of expression”) were clearly expressive of a distinct directorial personality, or directors who were merely “metteurs en scene” – to cut it short, second rung directors whose felicity of expression did not however manifest a distinctive directorial personality – thus endless feuds and arguments between cinephiles of various stripes over many years. I still have a seriously cineliterate friend who regards Powell and Pressberger as metteurs en scène. I think he’s nuts.

It ought to be pointed out also, the French term decoupage which, during the thirties had a substantially conjunctive meaning to mise en scene, was originally used in essence to express the general filmic rhythms vis a vis cutting, camera movement montage – in short the grammatical “layout’ of the film’s visual style.

But like mise en scène, decoupage got into the hands of English language critics and by the 90s or earlier was becoming so overused that the original meanings have simply become debased.

Section 4 of part 1 of How Movies Work, by Bruce F Kawin [1992], titled Montage and Mise-en-scene in the Narrative Film [starting at page 87], does a very good og job of explaining Mise-en-scene and Montage in separate sections, only once briefly mentioning decoupage:

The French term for simple continuity editing is decoupage: it denotes “ordinary” sequential cutting, where one shot follows another in a linear, easy-to-follow manner

This section is followed by by detailed examples of how mise-en-scene and montage work.


Then there is paper in Continuum:The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2 (1990)


‘The mystique of mise en scene revisited’ by Barrett Hodsdon

FILM découpage / mise-en-scéne IV

Film study: an analytical bibliography


By Frank Manchel


Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1990

The four volumes of Film Study include a fresh approach to each of the basic categories in the original edition. Volume one examines the film as film; volume two focuses on the thematic approach to film; volume three draws on the history of film; and volume four contains extensive appendices listing film distributors, sources, and historical information as well as an index of authors, titles, and film personalities.

Google Book


Has a short section on page 112 on decoupage and mis-en-scene. 15 lines on mis-en-scene and then

This forms part of Chapter 1. You’ll find yourself scrolling back and forward from this section finding other interesting things. This quote in the section on The Narrative Film starting on page 107


Note 5 in André Bazin Revisited: André Bazin: Part 1, Film Style Theory in its Historical Context

Donato Totaro, 2003

There are two terms used by Bazin which either take on a different meaning in their English translation or don’t have an equivalent. Montage in English terminology implies a rigorous and expressive editing style. Most editing sequences juxtapose shots of varying space, time, and content combining to create an over- all idea, meaning, or tone. Editing implies the formal construction of the film from one shot to the next and is not nec­essarily expressive. Bazin uses the terms interchangeably. The second term, decoupage, has no English equivalent. The French definition is “to cut,” but applied to film the word is better described as construction. Noel Burch, in Theory of Film Practice, defines the three terms for which decoupage is inter­changeably used for as: 1) The final form of a script replete with the required technical information. 2) The practical breakdown of the film’s construction into separate shots/sequences prior to filming & 3) The underlying structure of the finished film, which has probably deviated from the original “decoupage.”

Film editing: The Art of the Expressive, Valerie Orpen, p.2:

FILM découpage / Mise-en-scène III

Catherine has linked to a very good 2011 paper in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 3 by Christian Keathley, 2011, which might be in the category of All One Ever Needed To Know About Découpage But Were Afraid To Ask: Bonjour Tristesse and the expressive potential of découpage.

Mise-en-scene – another explanation for the collection

What do artsy film critics mean by “mise-en-scene”?


from The Straight Dope ‘Fighting Ignorance since 1973’

FILM GODARD Le Mépris: Analysis of mise-en-scène

Le Mépris: Analysis of mise-en-scène

By

Roberto Donati

in

Offscreen

FILM ESSAY Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism ~ by David Bordwell

Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism

by

David Bordwell


Originally in Review of Cinema No. 21