Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television)
Language: English
Pages: 235
ISBN: 1349444170
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Styles of filmmaking have changed greatly from classical Hollywood through to our digital era. So, too, have the ways in which film critics and scholars have analysed these transformations in film style. This book explores two central style concepts, mise en scène and dispositif, to illuminate a wide range of film and new media examples.
Odd Man Out (BFI Film Classics)
The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory
Nosferatu (BFI Modern Classics)
by filmmakers and a commitment to develop analysis and reflection from this foundation. Each volume will be committed to the appreciation of new areas and topics in the field, but also to strengthening and developing the conceptual basis and the methodologies of critical analysis itself. The series is based in the belief that, while a scrupulous attention to the texture of film and television programmes requires the focus of concept and theory, the discoveries that such attention produces become
chemistry of bodies and spaces, gestures and movements caught on film, irrefutably, no matter what was in the script beforehand, or whatever is to happen in the editing and soundtrack rooms later. And this magic did happen, often. Before the films of Mizoguchi or Renoir, Preminger or Welles, Nicholas Ray or Satyajit Ray – or, indeed, Bertolucci – cinephiles rightly gasp at the expressive eloquence and power of that three-point relation of camera-actor-environment as it clicks into place with
effect of a constant redrawing or reinvention of the scene as we watch it, often in startling and radical ways. And if Walkover differs, in this, from today’s slow cinema tactics, it also offers an alternative to Hollywood’s use of the long take. This is as true of Hollywood in the 1950s – Michael Walker (1970, p. 40) compares Skolimowski’s ‘total objectivity of viewpoint’ with the identification and involvement with characters created in the first shot of Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) – as it is
[Wood, 1998, p. 330]. For shame!) What then follows – recorded solely in a single two-shot, framing the characters from the chest up, running for a delightfully agonising 76 seconds – is the play of stolen glances and half-hidden smiles that pass between Jesse and Celine, superbly performed by the actors. Linklater elides everything extraneous to this action; the film passes directly from the shot of a hand (whose, it is does not matter) placing the needle on the album to the couple already
phrase pops up (such as ‘looking for something better’ or ‘Now I’ve got more time for myself’). The multi-screen montage work is both sequential (one screen lighting up after another) and simultaneous. But the only moment when all screens play simultaneously, in a communal cry mingling rage and despair, is when two little words, shared by all these YouTube videos, are uttered: namely, ‘laid off’. Rule dogma guys Two snapshots of a changing, global film culture, from the beginning of 2010. 1.A
