Mise-en-scène

LATER USES OF MISE-EN-SCÈ NE

Mise-en-scène remains somewhat rare in Hollywood filmmaking, because it is expensive, and worst of all (in the studio's eyes), it calls attention to itself rather than allowing the screen to become a transparent space in which a story gets told. But some contemporary directors are emerging with a recognizable visual style that is all but synonymous with mise-en-scène. David Fincher (b. 1962) is one. Se7en ( Seven , 1995), The Game (1997), and Fight Club (1999) set up consistent visual palettes and compositional structures for their fictional worlds. Seven was filmed in color, but Fincher and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, manipulated it so that almost every shot is washed with a yellow-green tint—an unpleasant look that, along with the darkness and unending rain, express the grimness of the film's universe. Fincher also used a pattern to control his mise-en-scène: here and in other of his films, he constructed his shots along a horizontal line to complement the wide-screen format he used. As in Psycho , everything was bound: composition and camera movements occur along the line that set boundaries for an otherwise unlocalized world. Seven is set in an unnamed city, gray and always raining. At the end of the film, after a relatively short drive, the characters find themselves in a desert strung with power lines. Like an expressionist film, Seven creates a state of mind, but not an individual one. Instead, like Psycho , its mood is one of universal anxiety.

The most important reason to emphasize mise-eǹne was and remains a director's sense of opposition to the largely anonymous style of Hollywood filmmaking and its rapid, invisible editing. The creation of a coherent and articulate mise-en-scène is a means to personal expression. From the quiet domestic spaces of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963), who defines his characters by what surrounds them, to the vertiginous, shadowy spaces of the worlds created by Orson Welles, to the abstract cityscapes of Antonioni and the imprisoning interiors of the German filmmaker Werner Rainer Fassbinder (1945–1982), to the expresscesive compositions and camera movements created by Martin Scorsese (who uses Fassbinder's cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus), creative filmmakers have developed alternatives to Hollywood's illusory realism through mise-en-scène. The technique, like other modernist ones, foregrounds rather than hides the medium's processes. Choosing angles, moving a camera, deciding how the camera should be positioned and the scene dressed and lighted are among the things that cinema, and no other single art, can do. These cumulative aesthetic decisions are the marks of great filmmakers as they create complete and coherent fictional worlds.