THE SHOT: MISE-EN-SCENE ch we OF all the techniques of ¢ the one with wh are most familiar, Mer seeing a film, we may not reeall the cutting or the camera movements, the dissolves or offscreen sound. But we do remember the costumes in Gone ivith the Wind or the bleak, chilly lighting in Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadi of the rainy, gloomy streets in The Big Sleep or the cozy fuinily home in Meet Me in St. Louis, We veal Harpo Marx clambering over Edgar Kennedy's peat (Duck Soup) and Katharine Hepburn defiantly splintering Cary 's golf clubs (The Philadelphia Story). In short, many of our most sharply etched memories of the cinema turn out to center on mise-en-scene, EA Wnar Is MISE. r and it was first appl plays. Film scholars, extending the term to d “meezaalin-sen”) means to the pructice of di i clirection, tise Une tern to rand. As yor would expect from the term's theatrical ori oe I! controlling the mise-e In the original the director stages the erent for the eametfs Hio)"TWke SHOT: MIS! EN-SCENE REALISM _ Before we analyze brought to light. Just as viewers often rem scene from a film, so Mewes ofle judge realisii.y A car may seem to be realistic for the period the film depicts, fa gesture may not se stic because “real people don’t wet that way. Realism as a standard of value, however, rises several problems, ions of realism vary across cultures, through time, and even among als eel “realist” the 1951 filun On the Waterfront looks stylized today. i crities of the 1910 Hart's Westerns for bei «but equally enthus ities of the 19208 considered the same filins to be ax ail epics Moreover, reulism has become one of the iv the philosophy of art. (See Notes and Qu. sist rigidly on pene fr all fi Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Fig. he jagged rooftops and slanted chinmeys certainly do not accord with our conception of normal reality. Yet to condemn the film for lacking realism would he inappropriate, because the film uses stylization to preserit a madman’s fantasy. The Cabinet of Dr, Caligari borrows conventions of Expressionist painting and theater and then assigns them the function of suggesting the madman's delusion, It is better, then, 1o/examine: the functions of mise-en-scene than tw dismiss this or that element that happens not to match our conception of realism. ‘The filmmaker may use any system of mise-en-scene, and we should analyze its function in the total film—how im scene is mol vated, how ops, how it works in relution to narrative atid by standards of Jon Brando's acc problematic issues examples.) Most important, to in 1 5.1). would indeed impoverish «d_ normal_conceps the cinema’s first master of MAMMA wisesennasns ‘eval. in to ary world on fi tions of reality, 3 the technique, Gear create w totally imag A caricaturist and magician, Mélids became fascinated by the Lumidre brothers’ demonstration of their short films in 1895, (Hor=were—an=Hre Lumitrox oop az amas I=AS4-) After building a camera similar to the Lumitre machine, Méliés began filming unstiged street séeies andl moments of passing daily life.POWEI OF MISE-EN.SCENE /147 nescene. He would devote most of his efforts to But to do so would require preparation, si on lucky accidents like the bus-hearse transfo plan and stage action for the camera. Drawing on built one of the fi He would haw ates his films? mise-e Such control was necessa tudio made hundreds of short fan over every element