Hello friends,
Welcome to ‘Besides the Mise-en-scène,” a newsletter that seeks to approach film analysis and appreciation from an unusual perspective. The title is an allusion to that goal.
Mise-en-scène is a term I’ve read over-and-over again in cinema seminars and classic film studies texts. For me, it has come to represent a very familiar approach to film analysis, namely formal dissections of editing, camera maneuvers, shot compositions, and so forth. This kind of analysis can be quite rich – see David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith’s Criterion Collection series Observations on Film Art for some prime examples – but it’s so familiar that every time I attempt it myself it starts to feel redundant and dry. There is some utility in pointing out how a cinematic technique serves a film’s story, but what about how it fails the story? Or what about how a story fails its subject? Or how a director fails her actors?
The kind of analysis I enjoy these days involves these more negative trains of thought (negative in the sense of absent or missing). Usually, engaging in that kind of analysis requires reference to some external text or discipline that enriches my filmgoing experience beyond that classic formal analysis.
Through this newsletter, I want to use external sources to ask questions of films that standard formal analyses overlook. I want to think about what is present in the mise-en-scène that the director did not intend. I want to ask what is missing from a film that a better screenwriter might have added in to complicate the narrative. I want to honor films that challenge or break convention in interesting ways. Most of all, I want to use cinema as a way of better understanding the world.
I think that relationship – between cinema and the world it represents – can be more complex and reciprocal than it often gets credit for in a basic formal analysis. Perhaps that’s because, for better or worse, movies have become the dominant filter through which certain subjects come to life in my mind. It is hard to talk of family without invoking The Godfather. It is difficult to consider American imperialism without reference to New Latin American cinema. It is impossible to walk through Downtown Los Angeles without feeling the absence of Bunker Hill – the demolished working class neighborhood that once served as a backdrop to many noir films.
No matter the subject, a cinematic experience comes to mind.
If a lifetime of cinephilia comes with any advantages, one of them must be an ability to meditate on life experiences through a plethora of cinematic ones. At the very least I have found this proclivity a comfort. One best enjoyed with an audience.
See you at the movies,
Ryan