Mise-en-scène

FILMMAKERS AND MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Mise-en-scène has preoccupied filmmakers in several countries and periods. German expressionism developed immediately following World War I. In painting, writing, and filmmaking, expressionism was a mise-en-scène cinema, expressing the psychological turmoil of the characters in terms of the space inhabited by its characters. Major representatives of German expressionism in film include Robert Wiene's Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari ( The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , 1920) and F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens , the first Dracula movie (1922). These and many others created a dark and anxious visual field, uneasy and frightening. German expressionism had enormous influence when its practitioners moved to the United States: Murnau's Sunrise (1927); Universal Studio's horror films of the early 1930s such as Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and their sequels; Citizen Kane (1941); the film noir genre of the 1940s; Psycho (1960); and Taxi Driver (1976). These, among others, borrowed their idea of mise-en-scène from German expressionism, though it was not the only influence on these films.

Later directors developed highly individualized mise-en-scènes. Michelangelo Antonioni (b. 1912), for example, created an extremely intricate and eloquent mise-en-scène in films such as Il Grido ( The Cry , 1957), L'Avventura ( The Adventure , 1960), La Notte ( The Night , 1961), L'eclisse ( The Eclipse , 1962), Il deserto rosso ( Red Desert , 1964), Blow-Up (1966), and Professione: reporter ( The Passenger , 1975). As Rosalind Krauss has noted in The Optical Unconscious , Antonioni, like the American abstract expressionist painters of the time (Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, for example) reversed the usual conventions of foregrounding the human figure against a background (pp. 2–27). Antonioni believed that the background—or, in his case, the character's environment—should be foregrounded, the characters constituting only one part of the mise-en-scène, which defined them by where they were, what was around them, and how they were observed by the camera.

Architecture is Antonioni's essential point of reference; the themes of his films were not reducible to plot but rather explore how the spaces inhabited by his characters explain their predicaments—something they themselves cannot adequately do in words. Antonioni framed characters in windows and often composed them among buildings that loomed strangely over them. In his color films, color itself defined situations. The belching yellow smoke from factories in Red Desert , the camera that unexpectedly drifts away from a character to follow a blue line running along the ceiling in the same film, create moods that allow viewers to understand the characters visually in ways that they don't understand themselves. Like an abstract expressionist painter, Antonioni worked to rid his work of the individual human figure. At the end of The Eclipse , the two central characters promise to meet at a certain location. They do not, and the last ten minutes of the film are composed of a collage of almost abstract cityscapes peopled, when at all, by anonymous faces. The camera's attention, however, focuses on things: water dripping from a drain; sprinklers watering a field; a horse-drawn sulky carrying a man across the street; a building wrapped completely in mats. This is an abstract vision of unexplained, anxiety-producing images. A hint is offered in a newspaper headline that reads "Atomic Bomb." Free-floating anxieties of the post-atomic world diminish the human figure in light of events not under the control of individuals.