33 Alexandre Astruc: 'What is mise en

scene?'

('Qu'est-ce que la mise en scene?', Cahiers

du Cinema 100, October 1959)

-
One doesn't need to have made a lot of films to realize that there is no
such thing as mise en scene, that actors can do quite well without it and
that any chief cameraman knows how to position the camera to get the
appropriate shot, that the continuity between shots takes care of itself,
etc. Mizoguchi and Ophuls obviously understood this very quickly and
then moved on to what really interested them .... Watching how people
act? ... Not exactly. It could more aptly be described as presenting them,
watching how they act and at the same time what makes them' act.
The difference between the cinema and anything else - including the
novel - is, primarily, the impossibility of telling a lie, and secondly the
absolute certainty, shared by the spectator and the author alike, that on
the screen everything will be resolved with time. If the director - the film-
maker - actually intervenes anywhere in the making of the film it is
essentially here. He runs a course between two realities: the image through
which he observes the world and the duration within which the resolution
comes.
\tVithin which he does not, however, destroy: the slow erosion of truth
which is the art of a Proust and which explodes in someone like Faulkner
presu pposes the novel written in words, the fragments of eternity. While
it may hold and fix the real, it does so only at the cost of an unceasing
effort of decomposition and destruction of forms, a relentless advance and
assault on a vocabulary whose debris is carried drifting in the current.
The camera fixes; it does not transcend, it looks. One has to be naive
to imagine that the systematic use of an 18.5 lens will make things any
different from what they are. In exchange, it never lies. What is caught
by the lens is the movement of the body - an immediate revelation, like
all that is physical: the dance, a woman's look, the change of rhythm in
a walk, beauty, truth, etc.
The cinema assumes a certain trust in the world just as it is. Even in
the midst of ugliness and poverty; it uncovers that strange and cruel

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 Alexandre Astruc: 'What is mise ell schu?'

tenderness, that terrible sW~'-2tness of Hiroshima, where some rapi l

tracking shots in the heart of a city, and the voice of a woman, are enoug
to dissipate so many horrors and to bring about a change in the landscap
so that, quite naturally, it becomes organized into a human perspectivE
and some strange seductive force makes it seem that, quite naturally, a
that is still an expectation here will some day be completely fulfilled.
One of the most beautiful films in the world has been made by an 01,
Japanese director, the author of some hundred or so films, with, I ar
certain, no other desire than properly to practise his craft. It takes anI
five minutes for Ugetsu mOl1ogatari to demonstrate clearly the meaning e
mise en scene - for some at any rate: a certain way of extending states e
mind into movements of the body. It is a song, a rhythm, a dancE
Mizoguchi is well aware that what is expressed in physical violence canne
be made to lie. It is not character, it is not self-knowledge, but the
irresistible movement that casts itself ever forward along the same path!
in the pursuit of fulfilment - or destruction. I imagine that what interest
him - after so many films - is no longer even this spectacle itself, but th
impossibility of turning away and ceasing to contemplate it. It is possibl
that a writer writes to free himself - for a director it is never quite tha
In the tenderness or in the horror of the universe that he exploits he hCl
to meet what one might call a kind of willingness or complicity, but whie
for the artist is never anything but the source of the greatness that obsess4:
him and which he believes he can reveal.
Then what happens to technique? It ceases to be a way of showing
or of concealing. Style is not simply a means of making beautiful what:
ugly, and vice versa. Not one director in the world will trust photograph
if the limits of his ambition go beyond competing with picture postcar&
Or even the development of an awareness: tracking shots are not note!
or references at the foot of a page. I rather think that the only function (
technique is to generate that mysterious distance between the author an
his characters - whose fluctuations and mad ra'.:t:'s through the fore!
seem to be accompanied by the movements of the camera with sue
fidelity.
Seem: for the strength and the greatness of this universe which reappeal
in film after film comes from the author's constant domination of il
elements. He bends them - not perhaps to his own vision - Mizoguchi .
a film director, not a novelist - but to a certain need to draw back froJ
them, wisdom or the will to wisdom. So the tragic poem draws its for(
from the apparent insensitivity and coldness of the artist, who seems t
have taken up his position, camera in hand, at the bend in the rive
surveying the plain from where the actors in the drama will emerge.
The exquisite and moving s\'\'eetness of Ugetsu mOl1ogatari consists, as i
some Westerns, in that irrevocab!t> slowness that urges on, maybe throu~
violence and anger, a handful of individuals whose destiny is insignifican
But Mizoguchi knows very well that ultimately it matters little \'\'hl'th~
his films end well, just as he does not worry whether the strongest bone

267

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J
 Polemics: Criticism

between himself and his characters are those of tenderness or of contempt.

He is like the voyeur who sees pleasure reflected in the face of the one
. he watches, even though he is well aware that it is more than this reflection
that he seeks: perhaps it is quite simply the wearying confirmation of
something that he has always known but cannot resist making sure of.
So I see mise en scene as a means of making the spectacle one's own - but
then what artist doesn't know that what is seen matters less, not than the
way of seeing, but than a particular way of needing to see and to show.
Between the canvas and the figures that obsess him, what the hand of
the painter brings is not a different manner of looking, but a new dimen-
sion. A Manet painting is not 'nature observed by a particular tempera-
ment', it is a thoroughfare for an aesthetic will, as irreducible to themes
as it is to the secret motivations of the artist, which perhaps sustain but
never exhaust it. Mise en scene isn't necessarily the will to give a new
meaning to the world, but nine times out of ten it is built on the secret
certainty of holding some fragment of truth, first about man, and then
about the work of art - indissolubly linked. Mizoguchi uses violence,
rapacity or sexual desire to express on the screen what he can release only
on condition that he meets those elements. But it would be absurd to say
that violence is the subject of his films. If he needs it, it is like the
alcoholic's need to drink: not to become drunk, but to feed his drunken-
ness. With him, as with the great masters of the screen, it is never the
plot, nor the form, nor even the effect that matters, nor even the possibility
of placing frenzied characters within an extreme situation: Mizoguchi, like
all Orientals, scorns psychology and verisimilitude. He needs violence as
the key that will open the door to another world. But as in Baroque
painting, the rain of the storm lashing on to those grimacing faces and
those crippled bodies is the harbinger of calm. Beyond desire and violence,
the world of the Japanese director, like the world of Murnau, lets the veil
of indifference descend once more, through which, in a cinema that could
be described as 'exotic', metaphysics makes a sudden intrusion.
Is there in the end such a difference between a Japanese film-maker,
master enough of his craft to be offered a seven-year Hollywood contract
- a man who is in fact very much like one's idea of a monthly salaried
engineer - and a late nineteenth-century poNe maudit? Baudelaire's opium
and Mizoguchi's craft have the same role in the end: they are pretexts,
like Proust's asthma or his homosexuality, like the yellow that intoxicated
Van Gogh - but who would say that yellow was even the subject of Van
Gogh's paintings, or their purpose? The artist seeks where he thinks to
find his conditions of creation: the director in the studio, in the brothel,
in the museum ....
The world of an artist is not the one that conditions him, but the one
which he needs in order to create and to transform perpetually into some-
thing that will obsess him even more than that by which he is obsessed.
The obsession of the artist is artistic creation.
Translated by Liz Heron

268