Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation explores and elucidates constructions of this fundamental concept in thinking about film. In uncovering the history of mise-en-scène within film criticism, and through the detailed exploration of scenes from films as Imitation of Life and Lone Star, John Gibbs makes the case for the importance of a sensitive understanding of film style, and provides an introduction to the skills of close reading. This book thus celebrates film-making as well as film criticism that is alive to the creative possibilities of visual style.

The life of mise-en-scène offers a critical history of key debates about visual style in British film journals in the post-war period. It reclaims an often-ignored or misrepresented history, including: the concept of film poetry in the journal Sequence, changing attitudes in Sight and Sound during the 1950s, and the battle over the significance of film style which raged between a number of small journals and the national press in the early 1960s. It examines the British school, first associated with Movie in the 1960s, which, in Adrian Martin’s words, is enjoying a ‘widespread, international revival’ – but also other critical movements, more hazily remembered. It explores the role of mise-en-scène in melodrama criticism, and considers what happened to detailed criticism as major theoretical movements emerged in the 1970s. In doing so, it provides a vital context for the contemporary practice of style-based criticism and challenges received notions of critical history, developing our understanding of a range of other key debates and concerns in the study of film.

Provides an in-depth analysis of Talk to Her, including both the formal elements of the film (its narrative, genre, and auteur study) and the themes and issues it raises.

This book sets out to explore the creation of interior atmosphere as seen through the lens of mise-en-scène. You will learn how this film theory informs the concept of 'staged space' translated through the narrative and expressive qualities of a particular scene. Jean Whitehead quickly takes this concept beyond the screen and considers its application to the interior 'setting'. By learning to use the ingredients that inform an 'interior' mise-en-scène such as its backdrop, choice of props, use of special effects alongside the application of colour, pattern, graphics, light and shadow, an immersive atmospheric experience can be created. Packed with inspiring examples and case studies, ranging from cinematic interiors and art installations, to the work of notable interior designers, stylists and architects with an interior interest, this book broadens current thinking around the design of the decorated interior. It will help you to embrace the concepts that underpin an interior mise-en- scène through the use of softer decorative techniques and concerns.

American film scholar Ed Sikov discusses all aspects of narrative films, describing mise-en-scéne, the significance of montages, editing, lighting, the use of color and sound, and related topics; and providing practical advice, suggested assignments, and other resources.

Noel Burch's new book is a critique of the assumptions underlying 'classical' approaches to film history: the assumption that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being; and the assumption that this language was a universal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself." "His major thesis is that, on the contrary, film language has a social and economic history, that it evolved in the way it did because of when and where it was constructed -- in the capitalist and imperialist west between 1892 and 1929." "The book examines the chronology of the emergence of what it defines as cinema's Institutional Mode of Representation and the socio-historical circumstances in which this took place. It examines the principles of visualisation -- camera placement and movement, lighting, editing, mise-en-scene -- that film-makers and audiences came to internalize over the first three decades. Special emphasis is laid on the allimportant change that occurred in the imaginary placing of the spectator, from a position of exteriority to the film image, implicit in both film-form and viewing conditions during the primitive era (pre-1909), to the imaginary centering of the spectator-subject, completed only with the generalisation of lip-synch sound after 1929. It is the contention of this book that this imaginary centering of a sensorily isolated spectator is the keystone of the cinematic illusion of reality, still achieved today by the same means as it was sixty years ago.

A director reveals the original inspirations for his films, their history, his methods of work, and the problems of visual creativity