Apropos of props

The venerable concept of mise en scène sets the stage (for what else can it do?) for Metteurs en Scène. Remarkable in its transcendence of the vagaries of academic Film Theory, mise en scène continues to naysay the individualist orthodoxies attendant at that intellectual tradition’s birth in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma and the cinémathèques of 1950s and ’60s Paris. There and then, to designate a filmmaker as a metteur en scène rather than an auteur was to damn with faint praise, privileging an idea(l) of creativity as a matter of individual imposition rather than collective conversation and mutual facilitation. Thankfully, however, mise en scène still metteurs today. Roughly translatable as ‘putting on stage’ and encompassing all visible and audible aspects of a movie, mise en scène conceives and celebrates creativity as collaboration. In its specifically cinematic application mise en scène proposes we apprehend film language as a babelesque babble of interrelated dialects (cinematography + costume + sound + set + props + performers and so on) endlessly figured then reconfigured in dialectic relation, rather than a monoglot lexicon articulated by splendidly isolated auteur-orators (‘a film by Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Howard Hawks, Michael Powell, etc’). Moreover, in the detailed attention it pays to the sensual and physical, mise en scène also asks us to understand cinema as a multi-dimensional physical and imaginary space rather than a liquid sheet of light and colour pouring straight onto and then straight off the sheer face of an impermeable 2-D screen; it ushers the viewer into the room beyond the window, and it’s perhaps here that no small part of film’s fascination lies. It’s something very like that invitation, to come away in and set yourself down on set, which the organisers of Metteurs en Scène reissue to you now.

Dr Jonny Murray (Unsought & Unsound)