The Books of My Life: Mise-en-Scène

As I have mentioned before I am and have long been a cinephiliac. I grew up watching, along with my sister, film after film in the afternoons and evenings on the television, something that was easy to do back in the "good old days" when you could watch film after film on network era television. Eventually my film watching morphed into reading about films. I got Leonard Maltin's film guide when it first came out and when I found Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films in a used bookstore I bought it, read it, and was blown away by it. I still am.

When I went away to college my film watching and film education continued. Bloomington, home of Indiana University, was a cinephile's paradise when I was a student there. One could watch classic Hollywood films on the big screen at the Union, Hollywood and foreign films at the Monroe County Library where the Bloomington Film Society set up shop, and mostly foreign films at the various locations around Bloomington where the Ryder held film court. I also occasionally went to the night time showings of films for the many film classes at IU. I was in heaven. I had achieved nirvana.

Though I didn't major in Film I did take the occasional film class with Harry Geduld, Peter Bondanella, and James Naremore. I have very fond memories of studying with all three and of Naremore taking me and a few other classmates upstairs in Ballantine Hall to view Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo frame-by-frame. Like so many during the era I, though I was brought up on the auteurist and Movie approaches to film analysis and film criticism, fell in with the semiotics crowd, something easy to do as IU was one of the centres for the study of semiotics and semiology in the world at the time, and I took a graduate seminar with Naremore on the semiology of film. I never forgot my love of the Movie approach to film criticism, however, and it is not surprising that late in life I find myself returning to it.

John Gibbs, a third generation Movieite, in his Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation (New York: Wallflower, Short Cuts series, 2002), argues that it is mise-en-scène, film style, that defines a film's meaning, and that a close study of film style, regardless of the type of film--commercial or artistic--is essential if critics and film goers are to fully understand a film and fully understand how meaning is constructed and works in films. We can't tell anyone what a film is trying to say to us, writes Gibbs, if we do not comprehend what a film is trying to say to us through its mise-en-scène.

Gibbs's book tries to provide film critics and film goers with a method by which they can understand what a film is trying to say. In Chapter One Gibbs offers a definition of mise-en-scène, anything in the frame and the way what is in the frame is organised. In Chapter Two Gibbs explores the interaction between mise-en-scène and other elements of a film such as narrative and editing. In Chapter Three Gibbs argues that the interaction between all the elements of a film creates, a la V.F. Perkins, in good films, coherence. In Chapter Four Gibbs explores the relationship between mise-en-scène and film authorship, arguing, like other Movieites before him, that a directors signature in Hollywood commercial films can sometimes be discerned in how a director organises the elements of a film, particularly in how he or she organises his or her mise-en-scène. This claim that Hollywood had director auteurs, by the way, was something that was controversial in the 1960s and 1970s given that many critics assumed  that Hollywood produced commercial and that such popular entertainments were not authored. In Chapter Five Gibbs explores the important role mise-en-scène plays in melodramas, particularly the domestic melodramas of Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, and Nicholas Ray, types of films that often emphasise mise-en-scène adding, in the process, complexity to the meaning or meanings of a film. In Chapter Six Gibbs brings all of the above to bear on an analysis of a scene in Douglas Sirk's famous melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959), and its meanings. In an appendix Gibbs provides readers with a brief annotated history of mise-en-scène criticism.

Gibbs's Mise-en-Scène should be required reading for anyone interested in film and in film meanings. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in culture, criticism, film in general, and Hollywood films of the classic era in particular. That said, not everyone will find all of Gibb's arguments compelling. Some will, for example, wonder about the validity of the assertion that meaning can be discerned and explored in films without an understanding of a films broader social and cultural contexts.