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Mise-en-Scene

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Mise-en-Scene






Mise-en-scene, the French theatrical term for the organization of all the materials on the stage, is the unifying concept behind the style and critical reception of expressionist cinema.  In terms of breaking down a film, or a sequence within a whole, then the following categories are what encompass mise-en-scene or staging in film and what you should look out for when studying an example of expressionist cinema.


Mise-en-Scene / STAGING

The filmmaker stages an event to be filmed.  What is put in front of the camera?  How does the staging comment on the story?  How does it visualise the main conflicts of the story?

Setting:
On location or in the studio?  “Realistic” or stylised?  Historical or contemporary?  Are there props which take on a symbolic function?  Are things like mirrors, crosses, windows, books accentuated?  Why?  How do sets and props comment on the narrative?

Space:
Cluttered or empty?  Does it express a certain atmosphere?  Is the design symmetrical or asymmetrical?  Balanced or unbalanced?  Stylised or natural?  Open form: the frame is de-emphasised, has a documentary “snapshot” quality.  Closed form: the frame is carefully composed, self-contained, and theatrical, the frame acts as a boundary and a limit.  Is space used as an indirect comment on a character’s inner state of mind? 

Lighting:
What is illuminated, what is in the shadow?  Lighting quality:  hard lighting (bold shadows) or soft (diffused illumination)?  Direction: frontal lighting (flat image), side-lighting (for dramatic effect), backlighting (only the silhouette is visible), underlighting (from a fireplace, for example)?  Realistic or high contrast / symbolic lighting?  High key or low key?  Special lighting effects (e.g. shadows, spotlight)?  Natural lighting or studio?  Hollywood has three light sources: key light, fill light, and backlight.  How does the lighting enhance the expressive potential of the film?

Acting and Choreography

What do appearance, gestures, facial expressions, voice signify?  Professional actors or non-actors?  Why?  Movement of characters: toward or away from the camera, from left to right or vice versa?  Do characters interact with each other through their gaze?  Who looks at whom?  Grouping of characters before the camera; view of characters (clear or obscured behind objects, isolated or integrated, centre or off-centre, background or foreground?  How do acting and choreography attract and guide the viewer’s attention (and manipulate his/her sympathies?)

Costume and Make-Up

Realistic or stylised/abstract?  Social and cultural coding:  what do the costumes signify (status, wealth, attitude, foreignness, etc.)?

Suggested Further Viewing



Further Viewing



The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, Germany, 1919)
The film which established the movement on the world stage.  It was released in America in 1920 and created an immediate impact especially on the burgeoning film community in Hollywood.





Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, Germany, 1922)
The first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which remains one of the most important horror movies ever made and established its director of one of the masters of expressionism.  The name of the film and the main characters were changed to avoid paying royalties to the Stoker estate.




Metropolis (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927)
Considered by many the towering achievement of German Expressionism and a touchstone film in the science fiction genre.  After fleeing the Nazis, Lang was to have a long and distinguished career in Hollywood.




Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, USA, 1927)
Murnau's Song of Two Humans was his first American film and remains one of the greatest achievements of the silent screen, a masterclass in two of the most important stylistic components of expressionism, lighting and motion, chiaroscuro and the "unchained camera". 




The Blue Angel (Josef Von Sternberg, Germany, 1930)
The film which made Marlene Dietrich a star, and momentarily bridged the German expressionist tradition with that of Hollywood, as the Austrian-American director shot two versions of the film simultaneously (one in German, one in English) at Ufa's Berlin studios.  This film also sets in motion the complex collaboration between the director and the film's star, a fraught partnership which are some of the most visually stunning examples of the male gaze in operation.






Nosferatu (Werner Herzog, Germany, 1979)









M, (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1931) 




The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)









The 39 Steps, Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1935.

One of Hitchcock's early masterpieces, and a film which still rewards repeated viewing with many Hitchcokian (and expressionistic) motifs in clear evidence; theatricality as a framing narrative, nature as oppressive and full of danger, blonde obsession, high contrast lighting matched with a fluid camera and so on.  

German Expressionism




GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA 1919 – 1933

Expressionism has its roots in painting (starting about 1910) and was quickly adopted by
theatre, literature, and architecture.  Flashback: a brief history of film, quotes that:

Expressionism emphasized a given artist’s emotional, intensely personal reactions; it was thus in contrast to the traditional view that an artist should strive faithfully to reproduce the natural appearance of the object or person being painted, sculpted, or written about. 

All different definitions of Expressionism acquaint it as a theory of art that expresses feelings in an abstract way.

The German Expressionist cinema from 1919 to 1933 was a new cinematic style that revealed a few widely regarded films.  As adapted for film, Pam Cook describes expressionism in her Cinema Book, as an “ … extreme stylisation of misé-en-scene …” and that “… the stylistic features of German Expressionism are fairly specific and include chiaroscuro lighting , surrealistic settings and, frequently, a remarkable fluidity of mobile framing”.  Flashback, adds that German Expressionism “… concentrated on a heavy use of light and dark contrasts, exaggeration, tilted angles, a dream-like atmosphere.”

As Pam Cook points out, World War One contributed to the development of German film productions.  After the closure of the borders the German film producer had to provide the domestic film market with their own products.  The number of film productions rose from 28 in 1913 to 245 in 1919.  Unfortunately, these films quality didn’t live up to the quantity in which they were being produced.  At this time German films were either blatantly commercial or mere copies of foreign films.

At the end of 1917, the German military and the government founded the Universum Film AG (Ufa) in order to influence the German cinema audience with propaganda films.  Almost at once Ufa became the major production company in Germany and swallowed up a number of pre-existing production companies, thus inheriting their directors, cameramen, actors, designers, etc.  In order to attract the domestic market Ufa’s producers had to increase the quality of German films.

The end of World War One in 1918, the collapse of the November Uprising and massive inflation all contributed to an export boom in the German film industry which began in 1919.  The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is generally regarded as the film which brought Expressionism to the German cinema.  It is also one of the most typical examples of German Expressionism.  It is the story of a madman’s fantasies filmed with starkly artificial sets, make-up, cardboard backdrops or painted Cubist shadows, which effectively suggest the disorientation of the storyteller’s mind.  We see the world as the hero does.  The world of the film is literally a projection of the hero’s vision.

As Siegfried Kracauer describes in From Hitler to Caligari, the film’s authors Carl Meyer and Hans Janowitz’s original story had been essentially changed by the director Robert Wiene.  While Meyer and Janowitz’s story exposed the madness inherent in authority, Wiene’s Caligari, glorified authority and convicted its antagonists of madness.  Wiene wanted his film to be commercial, answering to mass desires.  With his instinctive submission to the necessities of the screen, he put the original story into a framing narrative which introduces the hero Francis as a madman.

Caligari was designed by three expressionist artists.  One of them, Herman Warm, claimed:  “The film must become graphic art … I thought that the whole film could have been performed on stage.”  Kracauer mentions that in accordance with Warm’s belief:

… the canvasses and draperies of Caligari abounded in complexes of jagged, sharp, pointed forms, strongly reminiscent of Gothic patterns.  Except for a few slips or concessions – some backgrounds opposed the pictorial convention in too direct a manner , while others all but preserved them – the settings amounted to a perfect transformation of material objects into emotional ornaments.

It is interesting to reflect upon the fact that Caligari was completely shot in the studio.  It seems as if the camera did not take the plunge to go out onto the streets.  Kracauer points out that their withdrawal into the studio was part of the general German retreat into a shell.  The studio also allowed film producers much more possibilities to express abstract thoughts.  In the early 20th century some art forms such as painting moved towards bigger abstraction, towards “less topic and more art.”  The art of filmmaking had aspirations on the scale of painting and the other arts.  The Expressionist filmmakers used manipulative techniques to create a popular art form in the studio.  The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was a big success in the United States, France and other countries after its release in 1920, while the Germans seemed too close to it to appraise its symptomatic value.  The French coined the term “Caligarisme” and applied it to a post-war world seemingly all upside-down, which at any rate, proves that they sensed the film’s bearing on the structure of society.  After its release in the United States in April 1921 it gained world fame.  Because of its success other films in the expressionist style soon appeared.

In 1922, a short-lived studio, Prana Film, supplied Ufa with Nosferatu, directed by F.W. Murnau.  Murnau’s conception of Dracula as a rat in human form as successful at the box office with its gothic subject matter and visual style.

While the German economy recovered and the U.S. Dawes Plan helped to stabilise the country in 1924, the German film industry suffered a great deal.  In times of inflation, films were cheap and therefore easy to sell on foreign markets.  Now at the mark was stabilised, expressionist film budgets were rising and foreign films came in more frequently, offering a degree of competition unknown in Germany for nearly a decade.  The export boom in the film industry collapsed almost as quickly as it had started.  Murnau’s The Last Laugh was to suffer from this situation, becoming, in spite of laudatory press notices, a commercial failure.  “Murnau was the first to make camera movement a style sufficient into itself.”

As Pam Cook writes:
Expressionism as a national movement died out around 1924, though Expressionist tendencies can be found in later German films.  Metropolis (1926) made effective use of miniatures and other special effects.

Fritz Lang’s vision of the future was the most expensive German film to date.  Lang had employed some 800 actors, 30,000 extras and taken 310 days and 60 nights of filming.  Metropolis’ greatness is in its design, its geometric use of shapes as well as of masses of people.  The film works as a criticism of the manipulative capitalist system which both oppresses the people and transforms them into a monstrous destructive power.

An expressionist tendency lingered on in many of the German films even into the 1930s such as Lang’s M.  By 1933, when M was finally released in America, its half-Jewish director as well as its world famous star Peter Lorre had joined the exodus of talent which to date included Marlene Dietrich, Robert Weine, Billy Wilder, Carl Freund and Ernst Lubitsch who went to settle in Hollywood to avoid the impending rise of Adolf Hitler.





The Gaze



John Berger and Jean-Luc Godard argue that the history of cinema, is the story of men looking at women.  The male gaze is central to the formulation of classical Hollywood cinema and the 'star system' which is intrinsic to any understanding of this mode of expression.  The above image from Psycho (1960) implicates both the viewer and the filmmaker as peeping Toms, illicitly gazing at the unsuspecting woman as she undresses.  Norman Bates covers this peephole with a traditional painting of a nude woman, linking this activity to the Renaissance objectification of the female form by the male artists and patrons.  For Hitchcock, this male gaze is as much a part of art history as it is film history, and by implicating himself in this frame he illustrates the centrality of the gaze to the male psycho-sexual pathology.

The above frame begins and ends our First Semester discussion of expressionism in cinema.  By concentrating on Classical Hollywood, we are by implication focusing on the years 1930-1960, the heyday of the industrial studio system, which operated an assembly-line mode of production linked both to the integrated system of the studio brands (MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal etc.) and to the architectural entities of the warehouse-style studios and sound stages themselves.  Psycho is a film by arguably the master of this system, the culmination of years of flourishing practice under the restrictions of the commercial requirements of the industry.  It also marks the end of the very system which allowed it to exist.  It  literally takes a knife to the established order and kills off its star before we are half way through the film and in its way opens up the possibilities for a more independent American cinematic expression.

Further Reading:
The seminal text on the male gaze in Classical cinema is Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema', which was originally published in the British periodical Screen, and is one of the key texts in feminist film theory.

Here's a link to a pdf of the article:
imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf‎


Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, Germany, 1930), the film which launched the director's cinematic obsession with the actress.