Chapter 3: Mise-en-Scène

Essay: Design in Historical Dramas

Because time travel is impossible, human beings look to works of art for historically accurate re-creations of the past. From the early days of cinema, for example, historical dramas, also known as period pieces, have attempted to bring us back to other times, eras, places. In depicting the life of eighteenth-century Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for example, Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984) presents a world before electricity, where natural light and candlelight are the only options. The film re-creates the elaborate clothing and wigs of the era, as seen in the royal music halls of Europe:

Candlelight in Amadeus
Wigs, wigs, and more wigs
The spectacle of great halls and royal opulence

Audiences expect historical films to be emotionally moving and entertaining as well as informative, however, and so filmmakers often invoke "artistic license" and allow dramatic, economic, or artistic goals to take precedence over historical accuracy. Indeed, Peter Shaffer's vision of Mozart, in his screenplay for Amadeus and in the play he adapted for the screen, is highly controversial, seen by many musicologists as a complete distortion of the real person.

Spectacle for the Sake of Spectacle

Some filmmakers indulge the audience's desire for entertainment at the expense of historical purpose. The term spectacle refers to films that revel in pageantry, opulence, epic scale, and sensory excitement. The tendency for historical spectacles to focus on kings, queens, and the sweep of armies to the exclusion of more typical folk and more common events can result in a distorted view of the past. History, in this context, becomes more a playground than a museum. Producer and director Cecil B. DeMille lavished millions of dollars on "historical" films and biblical epics whose central purpose was to exploit the audience's desire for romantic spectacle. On films such as The Ten Commandments (1923), The King of Kings (1927), Cleopatra (1934), and his second version of The Ten Commandments (1956), DeMille lavished more money on costumes, sets, and props alone than most filmmakers budgeted for their entire productions.

D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), one of the first super-spectacles of the cinema, audaciously used parallel editing to tell four stories from different eras—Babylon (539 B.C.E.), Judea (27 C.E.), sixteenth-century France, and then-contemporary America. Filming long before the advent of digital effects, before even the perfection of matte shots (the combining of two separate shots on one print, bringing together elements, such as figures and backgrounds, not filmed at the same time), Griffith simply built the sets he needed to show, say, a battle for the city of Babylon involving thousands of people. The interiors and exteriors were among the largest and most elaborate ever created in the history of cinema, inspiring one of the first uses of the crane-mounted camera, which was needed to capture the epic scale. In the images below, note the color tinting, which was used to emphasize settings, themes, and scenes in early black-and-white movies.

In France, Abel Gance ended his monumental Napoléon (1927) with a three-screen, three-projector widescreen presentation:

In the late 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood attempted to counter the growing success of television (the small screen) with ever greater spectacles. Various widescreen formats—larger gauges of film stock—helped make these spectacles possible, as did the use of multiple cameras, special lenses, and special projectors. Cinerama, Vista Vision, Todd-AO, and many other systems competed to bring historical dramas to screens so wide and detailed that viewers could feel transported into the scenes:

The Rome of William Wyler's Ben-Hur(1959), shot in 65mm Technicolor

The Rome of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960), shot in 35mm (horizontal) Super Technirama 70

History as a Sense of Place

Though cinematic spectacle typically misrepresents the details of history, in its most successful forms it conveys the majesty and scope of epic human events. Expensive reenactments with "casts of thousands" remind viewers of the significance, the weight, of previous historical eras and events. Consider the scene in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982) in which thousands of the spiritual leader Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi's supporters wait for his train to arrive:

Gandhi arrives for protest

Or consider Edward Zwick's Glory (1989), when it captures the great hopes of a Northern city as it sends its troops off to fight in the Civil War:

A parade of Union soldiers

Cinematic spectacles may also serve as quasi-travelogues, bringing to landscapes an immediate visual sweep that the written word or the theater would be hard pressed to equal. Danish Baroness Karen Blixen's memoirs of her days in East Africa come to life in Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985), which was filmed on location:

Pre–World War II East African coffee plantation

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) reminds us that historical dramas need not focus exclusively on wealth, beauty, and spectacle. In telling the story of the last emperor of China, whose life spanned the rise of Communism in that country and thus his own dethronement, the movie lavishly depicts the Forbidden City and the child emperor's reception of his subjects:

But during the film's latter half, which charts the former emperor's internment, the monochromatic colors and spartan settings contrast powerfully with the rich and bold colors of the earlier scenes. In this film as in many other historical dramas, art helps us appreciate the vicissitudes of history:

Monochromatic repression and anti-spectacle in The Last Emperor