Chapter 3: Mise-en-Scène

Essay: Composition and Mise-en-Scène

Almost every shot in a professional feature film employs some compositional logic that supports the plot, characters, genre, or stylistic approaches of the film. Over the past century, filmmakers derived such compositional logic from the conventions of the graphic arts and still photography, but they have developed compositional conventions unique to the moving image. This module explores four of the many compositional conventions characteristic of film. Three of these are relevant to any graphic art: diagonals, the frame-within-a-frame, and looking space. The fourth, the eyeline match, is a product of the cinematic need to edit different shots together in a spatially coherent manner.

Diagonals

In a diagonal composition, at least one diagonal line intersects with one or more of a rectangular frame's four corners. Typically, this composition adds a sense of purpose, harmony, and stability to the image. In the first example here--from Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998)--the abstract set and lighting accentuate this effect. In the context of the film, this composition creates a visual metaphor that suggests a "stairway to heaven."

Below, a shot from William Wyler's widescreen epic Ben-Hur (1959) uses diagonals in a dramatic way. (The lines added to the duplicate image emphasize the various diagonals and show how the faces and helmets of the trumpeters lead almost precisely from the top left corner to the bottom right corner of the frame.)

A strong diagonal composition in a widescreen film accentuates and almost celebrates the widescreen aspect ratio. In the 1950s, when Hollywood employed widescreen spectacles in an attempt to compete with the popularity of television, shots like this challenged the small, square, and at that time black-and-white television box: Try to top that! the filmmakers were saying.

The following two shots, from Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960), illustrate another familiar use of the diagonal composition: the depiction of lines of figures moving across the landscape, a convention typical of many classical and landscape paintings. Like Ben-Hur, Spartacus was a widescreen spectacle that aimed to present images television could not. Here, the composition helps convey and celebrate historical sweep, as thousands of slaves migrate across disparate landscapes. For a different effect, the filmmakers might have avoided such formal compositions and instead aimed for a type of realism, say with the sometimes shaky handheld camerawork we associate with on-the-scene news footage.

Frame-within-a-Frame

A frame-within-a-frame occurs when a diegetic element (something within the story world) frames a character or an object. Frequently used frames include doors, windows, and other architectural elements. Natural frames such as tree branches and foliage are also used.

Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967) begins with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) fleeing from the middle-aged crowd attending his college graduation party to the security of his bedroom. In the first example here, Mrs. Robinson's (Anne Bancroft) dramatic entrance is framed in the doorway of Ben's room. (Within the same shot, Ben is also "framed" within the world of his aquarium—a visual representation of entrapment that is repeated many times throughout the film.)

This first frame-within-a-frame begins a pattern of framing that includes one of the most famous frames-within-a-frame in cinema: here, Mrs. Robinson frames Ben in the crook of her leg as she tries to seduce him.

The following two shots also frame Ben with Mrs. Robinson's body—a technique that allows the viewer to focus on Ben's responses to the seduction and to imagine Mrs. Robinson's carnality.

Looking Space

The term looking space refers to the filmmaker's tendency to allow greater space in front of a character in compositions that emphasize looking or forward motion. The first two shots here—from George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace (1999)—illustrate a straightforward use of looking space.

The Graduate offers a bit more sophisticated treatment of looking space. The film opens with Benjamin returning home via airplane and traveling through the airport via a people mover.

In the first moments of the scene, there is a little too much looking space to the left of Ben's gaze. Even a casual viewer who has limited knowledge of film's critical vocabulary will have a vague sense that something ought to fill all that empty space to Ben's left. The white background wall dramatically emphasizes the emptiness of the left and middle thirds of the frame.

This emptiness and sense of imbalance is soon restored, as the first titles dissolve into the shot and the title credits balance the composition.

The convention of providing looking space is so common and intuitive that most amateur photographers will allow looking space when they frame people looking or moving to the left or right of the frame. In the example above, image-editing software has been used to alter the actual frame from The Graduate. The altered still simply doesn't look right; most viewers would consider it a bad picture.

Eyeline Match

An eyeline match is a careful staging of shots that matches, from one shot to the next, the trajectory of a character's gaze at an offscreen place, person, or object. In real space, when a person looks directly at a thing, the angle of vision corresponds to the thing. In the filmic space of an edited sequence, however, filmmakers must create a logical and continuous space from the dozens if not hundreds of shots that have been filmed independently during multiple takes. An actor's eyelines can easily shift from one take to the next, but a good eyeline match makes the character appear to look in the appropriate direction and at the appropriate angle. (Eyeline-match mistakes commonly appear in student and other low-budget productions.)

The examples here are eyeline matches from Ben-Hur and Christophe Gans's Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des loups, 2001). In Ben-Hur, Esther (Haya Harareet) looks down toward a seated Judah (Charlton Heston), and in Brotherhood of the Wolf, the woman looks up a hill toward Manni (Mark Dacascos).

Mise-en-ScÈne

Filmmakers do not consult a checklist of compositional conventions when they shoot their films. Most aim to develop a visual style suitable to the narrative and tone of their work. The term mise-en-scène refers to a film's particular visual style. In chapter 3 of Looking at Movies we noted:

Thus composition and mise-en-scène are intimately related. While composition typically refers to a single moment or single shot, mise-en-scène implies an extended, systematic treatment of space.

John G. Avildsen's Rocky (1976) tells the story of a fighter from a tough, working-class Philadelphia neighborhood. The film's overall mise-en-scène helps convey the harshness of Rocky's Philadelphia. For example, Rocky trains in a meat-processing plant and runs though litter-strewn market streets, as in the first example here. But whether or not filmmakers shoot on location (as they did when making Rocky), mise-en-scène is their deliberate creation and not just a product of the film's location. Filmmakers choose what elements of a place will appear onscreen and manipulate the presentation of those carefully selected elements.

For example, in the first moments of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1983), which are set in New York City, a young woman views a great airport from a blasted construction zone.

Like Rocky, Stranger Than Paradise develops a mise-en-scène that bypasses familiar skylines and tourist attractions and reveals instead an alternative cityscape. When the characters drive south, Jarmusch presents a vision of Florida that is worlds apart from, say, the state's tourism promotions.

Compare these gritty urban mise-en-scènes with that of the final example—from Brotherhood of the Wolf—which echoes the luminous fantasy world of a Maxfield Parrish painting.

The Fourth Wall

In serious dramatic movies, actors usually do not look directly into the camera. Following theatrical tradition, they avoid making direct eye contact to maintain the sense that the audience is viewing another world through a transparent "fourth wall." Actors in stage and screen comedies have long violated this convention, as when Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey) face the camera and address viewers in Penelope Spheeris's Wayne's World (1992).

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) breaks this convention during a highly self-conscious and oddly comic moment in which Coppola appears as a director filming combat footage. The Coppola character waves Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) and his fellow soldiers through a beach landing with the direction "Don't look at the camera—just go on through and don't look at the camera."

Director Francis Ford Coppola: "Don't look at the camera"

In fact, during a very serious dramatic scene earlier in the movie, characters have already broken the fourth wall. In a book-length conversation about many aspects of filmmaking, novelist, poet, and screenwriter Michael Ondaatje and Apocalypse Now sound designer and editor Walter Murch discuss the scene:

General Corman (G. D. Spradlin): "the better angels of our nature"

Captain Willard (Martin Sheen): "Yes, sir, very much so, sir, very obviously insane"

In a totally different context, nonfiction filmmaker Errol Morris continually breaks the fourth wall, using a special mechanism that allows him to film his on-camera interview subjects while they look directly into a camera that is behind a reflection of the interviewer.

Compositional Motifs

A compositional motif is a visual composition that works thematically throughout an entire film. John Ford's western The Searchers (1956) provides one of the most famous examples of a compositional motif. In the first scene, Ford establishes a contrast between interior living spaces and the wide-open frontier. Over the course of the film, the Native Americans and Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) are associated with the unpredictable natural world outdoors; in contrast, civilization, family, law, and order are associated with the interior domestic spaces. The Searchers begins and ends with Ethan entering the interior spaces from the wild and then returning back to the wild, the door of civilization closing on him as it closed on the wild and violent frontier life of early America.

In Gandhi (1982), his epic biopic about Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi, director Richard Attenborough uses the compositional motif of English soldiers standing guard to emphasize the English colonial control of India and of Gandhi himself. The English soldiers consistently occupy the top of the frame, are always vertical (standing at attention, their forms echoing the adjacent pillars), and tower over the foreground; the patterns of these compositions suggest dominance and strength.

The reflection of characters in mirrors is another common visual motif. For example, the lead characters in Marc Forster's Monster's Ball (2001) gaze into bathroom mirrors at their moments of degradation, allowing viewers to empathize with the characters' anguish. A small mirror grotesquely distorts some of the actors' faces, highlighting the characters' inability to see their own predicaments clearly. A shot of Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton) includes another unsettling element: a photograph (reflected twice) of Lawrence Musgrove (Sean "P. Diddy" Combs), the man Hank helped execute and the husband of the woman he has just slept with. Instead of highly dramatizing this juxtaposition—perhaps with a moving camera—Monster's Ball maintains a steady medium shot here, as in its other "reflection" scenes. The restrained treatment encourages the viewer to reflect on the meaning of motif and scene.

Sam Mendes's American Beauty (1999) develops a compositional motif based upon its title, which refers to the famous variety of red rose. Here, color rather than geometrical arrangement within the frame serves as the compositional focal point in images of conventional beauty (a rose in a garden), licentious fantasy, and the spattering of blood. This compositional motif unites the movie's various observations on the nature of beauty and ugliness in contemporary America.

FOR FURTHER READING

Ondaatje, Michael. The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.