Two other reviews:
Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation.
By John Gibbs.
London: Wallflower, 2002. ISBN 1-903364-06-X. 128 pp. £12.99.
A Review by Kenneth Womack, Penn State Altoona, USA.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal/bookrev/books-may-04.htm
There is little question that film studies is one
of the most popular arenas of intellectual
inquiry in the contemporary humanities. And why
not? Our students consume vast quantities of
celluloid, and they do so -- for the most part --
uncritically. To say that we have a duty to
provide the necessary scholarly background for
this very significant and often intellectually
unmediated aspect of their lives is an
understatement indeed. Not surprisingly, a
variety of recent works have emerged in an
obvious effort to fill this breach. While Osmond
Borradaile's Life Through a Lens: Memoirs of a
Cinematographer affords us with a valuable
glimpse into the life and times of one of
Hollywood's most esteemed cinematographers, Leo
Braudy's The World in a Frame: What We See in
Films and John Gibbs's Mise-en-Scène: Film Style
and Interpretation offer astute introductory
guides to film study and appreciation. In their
respective ways, each volume provides us with an
illuminating inroad into the complex albeit
infinitely rewarding world of film
interpretation. Perhaps even more importantly in
terms of the life of the mind, each work would
make an admirable addition to the syllabus of
virtually any introductory course on film studies.
Written with the editorial assistance of Anita
Borradaile Hadley, Borradaile's Life Through a
Lens chronicles the late cinematographer's
formative experiences along the way to becoming
the influential director of photography for
Paramount Pictures. Known as "Bordie" among his
closest friends in the industry, Borradaile
affords readers with a fascinating examination of
the radical technical innovations that reshaped
cinematography, time and time again, during his
tenure at Paramount and beyond. In addition to
detailing his intriguing experiences across the
globe as an adventurer of sorts, Borradaile
fondly recalls his early initiation into the
world of the nickelodeon. In one instance, he
narrates his literally explosive boyhood
experience at a crude nickelodeon in Medicine
Hat, the remote Canadian city known for its
superfluity of natural gas deposits:
As he changed reels, the narrator promised us an
even greater treat: a film starring the most
famous of all comics, Happy Hooligan. But no
sooner had the projector begun clacking again
than a violent explosion rocked the building.
Fire broke out simultaneously, enveloping the
ceiling in a sheet of flames and shooting a huge
fireball over our heads toward the screen. As the
audience scrambled to escape the heat and flames,
some got trampled in their wild rush for the
exits. Being small, I was propelled along by the
momentum: under the screen, across the kitchen,
through the back door, and headlong into a barrel
of stinking restaurant slop. I fled the
terrifying pandemonium in a state of shock. (4)
While he may have been traumatized by such an
unexpected -- and, for the projectionist, tragic
-- turn of events, Borradaile was clearly
exhilarated by the incident.
Although Borradaile enjoyed professional renown
for his achievements at Paramount, his
autobiography's finest moments concern his
memories about the rigors and challenges of
working as a wartime photographer in the Second
World War's North African theater, where he
participated in the Ethiopian campaign and later
at the infamous siege of Tobruk. As a captain in
the British Army's much-vaunted film unit,
Borradaile often found himself acting both as a
soldier and as a photographer. Working under the
dictum that "guns take priority over cameras if
ever we were attacked" (136), Borradaile
configured a system of camera mounts and remote
controls that allowed him to fire his guns and
operate his cameras in tandem. Despite his yen
for innovation, Borradaile often found life in
peacetime England to be frustrating and
inflexible. During principal photography in
Scotland for Bonnie Prince Charlie (1946),
Borradaile recalled that "according to union
rules, only electricians were entitled to handle
the switch on an electrical apparatus. This new
regulation meant I could no longer switch my own
camera on and off. Unused to being dictated to on
how to operate my own equipment, I called a
meeting of the crew and informed them in no
uncertain terms that no one but myself would ever
stop and start my camera" (165). In many ways,
Borradaile's conflict with the proliferation of
unions underscores the increasingly complicated
world of the feature film -- an industry beset by
competing financial interests on one hand and a
profundity of technological innovation on the
other.
In the twenty fifth-anniversary edition of The
World in a Frame, which was originally published
in 1976, Braudy offers an entertaining and
imminently learned history of American film from
the 1930s through the 1970s. As one of the
nation's leading film scholars and critics,
Braudy devotes particular attention to the nature
of visual style and film genres, as well as to
various techniques regarding characterization and
narrative development. In one of the volume's
most useful moments, Braudy discusses his
conception of the "recalcitrant object" -- his
terminology for the found objects that writers
and directors employ to capture their viewers'
visual attention and to imbue their stories with
greater symbolic meaning. As Braudy observes,
"The interpretive weight on any one object (at
one extreme, to make it symbolic) interplays with
the continuous reality, the collection of objects
in time, that defines the film. In film nothing
exists in itself," Braudy adds, "only in the way
it is used, whether it be a river by Renoir, a
crucifix by Buñuel, a gun by Lang, a car by Penn,
or a beach by Bergman" (42). In Braudy's
estimation, such objects find their power via the
precision with which they are inserted into the
textual landscape of film. In this way, they
enjoy greater interpretive significance -- as
with Ford's appropriation of light in The Grapes
of Wrath (1940) or Hitchcock's application of
color in Torn Curtain (1966) -- while also
affording moviegoers with a more compelling and,
in Braudy's phraseology, "hallucinatory"
theatrical experience.
Braudy's most evocative chapter in The World in a
Frame concerns the interconnections between film
and society in 1970s cinema. Braudy astutely
distinguishes a paradigm shift in the films of
the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era in which
audiences increasingly began to identify with
directors cum storytellers -- auteurs, if you
will -- as opposed to individual stars. "The
shift of emphasis from the frame of the genre
film to the creator of the genre film mirrors and
accelerates a cultural shift from placing the
weight of responsibility on society to placing it
on the individual," Braudy writes. "The anxieties
about impotence and failure reflect the search
for myths of individual responsibility that can
survive the collapse of the social forms outside
the films" (174). In short, a larger cultural
accent upon individualism trumps the bland
heroism and melodrama inherent in the star
system's heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. As Braudy
remarks, "In 1940 society could absorb individual
energy and make it work. In 1971 society warps
and maims individual energy when it doesn't crush
it entirely" (176). In yet another revealing
chapter, Braudy examines the postulation of
literary character on film. Braudy contends that
postwar film owes much to an effective
"collusion" of sorts between actors and
directors. "The more intriguing and effective way
to transmit character and meaning through film,"
Braudy writes, "is to enhance the illusion rather
than break it down" (254). In this manner, Braudy
implicitly demonstrates the ways in which film --
by deepening its formation of character as the
driving force in its narratives -- establishes a
more lasting and meaningful connection with its
audience.
In Mise-en-Scène, Gibbs explores one of film's
fundamental (and least understood) concepts. In
addition to providing readers with a
comprehensive history of mise-en-scène, Gibbs
offers interpretive studies of mise-en-scène's
function in a wide range of films, including such
texts as Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959)
and John Sayles's Lone Star (1996). In so doing,
Gibbs highlights, in striking fashion, the manner
in which a film's visual style contributes to the
ways in which we think about cinema. In his
introduction, Gibbs establishes a working
definition of mise-en-scène that accounts for
many of the concept's vast range of elements,
from lighting, costumes, and décor to props,
lenses, and the actors themselves. As Gibbs
reminds us, "It is important to be able to
describe the individual elements of
mise-en-scène," yet it is also "worth remembering
from the outset that these elements are most
productively thought of in terms of their
interaction rather than individually -- in
practice, it is the interplay of elements that is
significant" (26). Gibbs shrewdly underscores his
arguments about the interactive nature of
mise-en-scène via his discussion of the
interrelationship between cinematic visual style
and such issues as camera positioning and the
mechanics of storytelling.
In his analysis of Sayles's Lone Star, for
example, Gibbs reveals the ways in which
stylistic elements interact to create a
fascinating and highly textured mise-en-scène. In
his film, Sayles employs a variety of elements --
including a very significant line in the sand --
in order to produce symbolic interconnections
related to Lone Star's thematic concern with the
nature of borders and their interstices with
ethnicity. In his investigation of Sirk's
Imitation of Life, Gibbs reveals the manner in
which the director's domestic melodrama imbues
its remarkable visual power from cinematographer
Russell Metty's stunningly original
mise-en-scène. Drawing upon the film's famous
bedroom sequence, Gibbs notes the complex
interplay amongst the sequence's décor, camera
positioning, and the scene's overall framing and
composition. These elements come together to
produce an overarching ambience in which the
narrative's larger meanings, in Gibbs's words,
"are not spoken but shown and felt" (96).
As with the volumes by Borradaile and Braudy,
Gibbs's Mise-en-Scène provides readers with a
worthy introduction to film study and
interpretation. While Braudy and Gibbs's texts
offer informative sourcebooks related to film's
expansive history and terminology, Borradaile's
Life Through a Lens usefully reminds us, frame by
frame, about the invariably human elements that
attract us to film study in the first place.
Richard Armstrong
Chasing the Phantasm
http://www.audiencemag.com/LIBRARY/Bindery/bind0404.html
The idea that the movies are a distinct and
singular art form has been a difficult pill for
mainstream British opinion. Overawed by our
literary heritage and blind to that which makes a
movie a movie, for generations our cultural
guardians have barred movies from the official
patrimony. "The films" are a mass distraction, at
best a "minor literature." Even today, public
policy enshrines the idea that movies are less an
art form, more a capital venture with
implications for the Treasury.
Aside from providing overviews of their subjects,
Wallflower's Short Cuts books are very good
orientation texts to the available literature.
"My task is less about saying something new, and
more one of bringing together, in the same place,
some of the ways in which mise-en-scène has been
thought about and put to use," writes John
Gibbs. Movie writing that analyses that mobile
mesh of camera activity, actor placement, set
disposition, quality of light and color,
editing, and what Andrew Sarris once
characterized as a scene's "temperature," has not
only helped secure a place for movies in the
official patrimony, but generated a distinguished
minor literature.
To Anglo-Saxon critics, mise-en-scène has proved
a hazy concept. Gibbs's working definition is as
good as any: "the contents of the frame and the
way that they are organized." When the French
critics at Cahiers du cinéma imported this
theatrical term into film criticism in the '50s,
to English-language ears it smacked of
unnecessary obfuscation. Penelope Houston at
Sight and Sound was having none of it, and in
1960 responded bluntly to the new wave sweeping
the shores of British film writing: "Cinema is
about the human situation, not about 'spatial
relationships.'" Pauline Kael was famously
suspicious of mise-en-scène: "It's a
mystique-and a mistake," she snapped in Film
Quarterly in 1963. Ironically, it took a literary
critic, Marion Magid, observing that famous spat
between Kael and Andrew Sarris over what he
(mis)translated as "the auteur theory," to
surmise that mise-en-scène stood for the
"movieness" of movies.
Yet the idea that a film's exploration of the
human condition could be deciphered through close
analysis of its textures and rhythms was not
entirely new to British film criticism. Moreover,
the idea that such exploration was the result of
sensitive direction went back to excavations of
modernists Hitchcock and Eisenstein at Close-Up
magazine in the '20s. Houston herself had been
active at the postwar Oxford University journal
Sequence, a magazine that took British film
culture to task for its refusal to countenance a
more catholic conception of what film criticism,
and filmmakers, could achieve.
Informing British suspicions of the new French
wave was a wide-ranging debate that also took
place in America in the postwar decades. The
debate revolved around the status of mass
culture. Was it capable of throwing light on
human experience, and therefore worthy of
serious criticism? Or should art be the product
of the solitary sensibility, thus amenable only
to the insights of an intellectual elite? Was the
very idea of commercially produced culture a
contradiction in terms? Or were pulp fiction,
comics, saucy postcards, jukebox tunes, movies
even, the very stuff of serious cultural insight?
As Gibbs shows, this debate fed into the rise of
Movie magazine, one of the most influential, and
well written, journals in the history of film
literature. Appearing in 1962, Movie translated
the "politique des auteurs," the guiding
principle of the Cahiers du cinéma critics and
later American auteurism, into the sort of close
and reasoned analysis that had been the province
of academic English Literature and its
handmaidens, the literary journals. Deploying
insights on narrative space, the impact of
Cinemascope on framing and composition, the play
of color in shaping mood, Movie shifted British
criticism away from woolly preoccupations with
"human values" and Big Themes that had calcified
the liberal arts, and made it increasingly
accountable to the text at hand. A new rigor and
discipline was entering British film criticism,
and it is to writers like V.F. Perkins, Mark
Shivas, and Ian Cameron that we owe the
canonization of Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray,
Vincente Minnelli, and Frank Tashlin. If the
Cahiers people backed their polemic against the
"literary" with a highly influential filmmaking
project, hailing from the educational
establishment, the Movie people would make the
serious study of film respectable in British
schools, colleges and universities. In 1979 I
had to read Victor Perkins's Film as Film in
pursuit of the British Film Institute's
Certificate in Film Study. It had more impact on
me than probably any film book I have read since.
ohn Gibbs wrote his 1999 PhD thesis on the
interpretation of visual style in British film
literature during the postwar decades at Reading
University, an institution that pioneered Film
Studies in Britain. This book makes you want to
revisit the work of Hollywood craftsmen who,
confronted with indifferent material, habitually
transformed it into compelling visual
storytelling. Gibbs introduces you to a rich seam
of commentary backed up with penetrating
analysis and topped with a thoroughgoing
bibliography. Like the critics at Movie, Gibbs
knows how to deduce from the evidence on screen,
and he guides your eyes and your thoughts through
key passages of The Lusty Men, Letter from an
Unknown Woman, and Imitation of Life. Exposed to
the intelligence, rigor and compassion of
Hollywood practitioners like Ray, Ophüls and
Sirk, how could the British critical
establishment not recognize the complexity of
commercial picturemaking and the place of the
individual director and moviegoer within it?
But close analysis had its limitations. Besetting
the Movie line by the late '60s was the problem
of how to reconcile visual interpretation with
the wider contexts from which movies get their
meanings and vibrations. What both Movie and
Cahiers du cinéma suffered from was a failure to
recognize that, whilst movies in isolation are
great, they breathe in and exhale a bigger
picture of society, politics, culture at large.
Arguably, Penelope Houston's complaint becomes
understandable when confronted with the extreme
pronouncements of auteurists like Cahiers's Luc
Moullet: "Morality is a matter of tracking
shots"! Beavering away on dissections of Johnny
Guitar or Anatomy of a Murder, it was perhaps
easy for the Movie writers to overlook the wider
world. One of the most necessary, and satisfying,
evolutions through which film literature has
passed, one that has benefited journals as
disparate in their concerns and readerships as
Cineaste and Senses of Cinema, is the
rapprochement between textual scrutiny and
sociopolitical awareness. In the wake of the
politicization of film and film comment in the
'60s and '70s, Movie found itself under the
influence of fresh Channel tides of structuralism
and semiology. Its enthusiasm, meanwhile, turned
to the emergence of New Hollywood, and that
revision of American narrative cinema.
Critical positions have a tendency to become
identified with particular movies or moviemaking
traditions. Lest it be thought that
mise-en-scène-inspired writing is best applied to
'50s Hollywood, Gibbs is keen to bring it
up-to-date by applying it to the contemporary
scene. An American director who emerged out of
the New Hollywood era, influencing the fit of
style and content by importing more and more of
the stuff of American experience into his work,
is John Sayles. With a searching exploration of
visual style, Gibbs makes the case for a thriving
critique of mise-en-scène in the age of the
poster quote, MTV cutting, and the fuzzy
recollections of academic audience studies.
Unpacking that scene in Lone Star in which Chris
Cooper's Texan sheriff Sam Deeds crosses into
Mexico to interview Tony Amendola's Chucho
Montoya, Gibbs focuses on Chucho drawing a line
in the dirt with a Coke bottle. Keeping its eye
on the actors, Sayles's editing, what is said,
what cameraman Stuart Dryburgh is doing, the
racial tension, the corporate branding, the
geopolitics, this detailed excursus shows what
good mise-en-scène analysis can do. Gibbs takes
the temperature of the moment.
Illustrated with the kind of clear, pertinent and
textured stills that Movie used to carry, this
book recalls a golden age of interpretation and
appreciation. Film as Film opens with a pair of
chapters: one on Eisenstein's montage theory,
one on realism and André Bazin. If Perkins saw
editing and deep focus as unhappy bedfellows in
vintage film writing, at Movie sporadic
attention to editing may have indicated a need to
emphasize the visual, out of deference perhaps
to the Hollywood director's often compromised
right to final cut. For its functional
allegiance to narrative, editing was also perhaps
symptomatic-apropos dialogue-of the traditional
British literary temper, for critics who relished
most the flowing genius of the phantasm before
their eyes. In Valerie Orpen's Wallflower title
on editing which I reviewed in December, she
stresses how useful Brian Henderson's 1976 piece
The Long Take is to an understanding of how
editing and mise-en-scène interact. Read these
two books back-to-back for, like editing and
mise en-scène, they make movies move.
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