homosuperior wrote:There's a discussion here http://www.criticker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2862 that gets sidetracked when the topic creator uses the phrase "mise en scène" and someone responds that's it's pretentious and that no one knows what it means.
The problem with the phrase is not that it's pretentious but that it's vague. It can mean anything and everything.
As an editor of an arts criticism blog in Argentina, I won't allow the word. It usually signals lazy writing. There is nothing in the phrase, mise en scène, that can't be conveyed with clear English words without any baggage. Precisely because the phrase is shorthand for something complex, any criticism would benefit from actually exploring those complexities in detail, rather than relying on a phrase that wikipedia describes as "film criticism's "grand undefined term.'"
Perhaps more relevantly, Jean Luc Godard and several critics from Cahiers (the film journal that originated the use of the phrase in the first place) declared the term dead. "We were wrong," Godard says. In 1965!
(I wish film fetishist David Bordwell had gotten the memo.)
Film critic Richard Brody helpfully puts Godard's declaration in context here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/08/mise-en-scene.html. The primary criticisms against use of the term is that encourages a dry academicism and that cinema is as much about what is out of the frame as is what is in it. Both perils are illustrated in the framing of the topic itself in the forum post mentioned up top.
So, let's kill the use of the phrase, mise en scène.
What does anyone else think?
I find this post exactly 11 times more pretentious than the term in question.
Look, mise en scene can be useful in a a pinch when describing a film. Of course a longer treatise on, say, the works of Kurosawa would be best served if each aspect of mise en scene was analyzed separately and thoroughly, but in the case of a mini-review or message board post, I don't see why it should be banished. Not every worthwhile comment on a film must be perfectly constructed, especially in a setting like the Criticker general message board. This is not Cahiers du cinema; it's a place where, yes, film is discussed fervently -- but it's also discussed casually. I suppose the longer review forum might be the one place where longer analytical reviews are the norm, but to call for the complete banishment of the term would be like scoffing at and dismissing a meal prepared with the aid of a store-bought spice mix. Sometimes I just want to throw some panch phoron in with my potatoes and be done with it, damnit.