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Mise En Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art By Adrian Martin Palgrave Macmillan, 236pp, 2014 ISBN: 9781137269942
Reviewed by Sam Dickson
What, exactly, is mise en scène? Among the key theoretical terms deployed within film theory, its boundaries and essential properties are notoriously ill-defined. Translated from the French literally as 'placing on stage', it frequently designates any loose number of the constitutive textual features of the film image, a word seemingly defined anew with each use. Adrian Martin broaches this murkiness directly in his book-length analysis of the concept. Rather than arguing at the outset for an essential understanding of mise en scène, the book introduces an historical account of the concept's various definitions and uses as well as, through a set of exemplary close readings, helpful suggestions of its analytic potential for contemporary film theorists. Putting the question to the reader at the beginning, Martin notes that 'any attempt to arrive at a workable definition needs to go down several different, discursive paths' (2). The monograph indeed approaches its subject through a heterogeneous set of critical territories including histories of the term within twentieth-century film criticism, close readings of twentieth-century films and interjections within theoretical arguments regarding twenty-first century media and art.
Mise en Scène and Film Style has been issued as part of the Palgrave Close Readings series, which in its mission explains that
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 vital in questioning and re-formulating theory and concept. Each monograph 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.
Refocusing theory from the basis of rigorous textual analysis is a promising prospect if it can move past some of the exhausted arguments and stale hermeneutic readings that make up so much of the critical work within contemporary film studies. As Martin claims in his introduction, mise en scène designates both a 'history of forms', of the various ways in which filmmakers have organised their audiovisual material, and the history...