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Which comes first - Technology or Style?

At the heart of all discussions of cinema style, form and, indeed, cinema as an art; is Mise en Scene. It seems such a simple thing...

The fundamental tool at the filmmaker’s disposal is their ability to selectively and specifically populate the frame with visible things; to place into the frame what is important, to leave out what is not and to arrange those contents in such a way as to produce understanding and comprehension on the part of the viewer.

As such, it seemed an obvious stride for theatrical ideas of being ‘on-stage’ to step over to the new illuminated moving image and for the camera viewfinder’s frame to take on the same micro-universe as the proscenium arch. Hence the term, derived from the French, Mise en scene meaning, rather literally, to ‘place on the stage’ or ‘put into the scene’. As such Mise en Scene is decidedly a verb - or as they taught us in primary school - a 'doing' word, an action.

However, despite referring as it does - in literal terms - to a proactive undertaking by a filmmaker, the term is most widely used in scholarly examination of cinema as a means of post-creation analysis; an analysis that is very often exceedingly broad in its judgment of artistic merit, cultural position, and sociological attitude rather specific artistic style and filmmaking craft. For filmmakers Mise en scene is a verb, a process; but for cinema studies it has been hijacked and corralled into service as a passive and openly re-interpreted noun.

David Bordwell has been one of the few high profile scholars to engage with the specifics film style aesthetics linked with the artistic problem-solving of filmmakers, and he comments that:

“Critics and scholars find it more natural to talk about a character’s psychological development, about how the plot resolves its conflicts and problems, or about the film’s philosophical or cultural or political significance.” (2005, p33)

Leveraging a literary vocabulary and a cultural-studies analytical structure in favour of an artistic or aesthetic one, contemporary cinema studies have mistakenly assumed the understanding of one leads directly and irrefutably to the other. More arrogantly, such cultural critiques assume to be able to explain all developments in cinema through prisms of sociology and culture. “scholars do seem to expect that a broad cultural perspective ought to yield insights into how films work”. (Bordwell, D 2005, p242) Bordwell goes on to say, more tersely, in the essay Film and the Historical Return, “I find it hard to imagine a convincing sociological explanation for why film stock was standardized at a width of 35mm.” (2005)

It’s this linkage between the analysis of cinema’s forms and the comprehension of its processes (and moreover its’ technology) of creation that is inescapable. And yet this link is one often, at best, downplayed or, at worst, dismissed. In revisiting the seminal work of Andre Bazin, Donato Torato has cited Bazin’s perspective that cinema is:

“only consequently technical… the idea precedes the invention and hence is superior to the technical means used to achieve it. " (Bazin, A 1967 cited in Torato, D 2003)

And yet whilst Bazin’s humanist perspective (commensurate, we might say, with Eisenstein’s assertion that imagination is more important than knowledge) touches our instinct to celebrate human ingenuity over ‘mere technology’, the assertion is also highly problematic for understanding cinematic process. The idea of technology as the formal follower of creative desire is one fraught with exceptions. A great many of the technical advances in moving image production preceded blindly the aesthetics and visual creative opportunities they spawned. Take for example the interlaced-image of traditional television and video. Rather than discreet individual frames shown in progression and producing the ‘persistence of vision’ fundamental to our perception of a moving-image, an interlaced image delivers alternate fields of horizontal lines; odd and even. The result is half as much visual information in each visual increment but displayed twice as often. The technological impetus for interlacing was primarily to provide an electronic match in the TV set with the standard oscillations of the domestic power-grid. In much of the world electricity is delivered to the home at 50hertz – 50 oscillations per second. As such PAL television operates at 50 interlaced fields per second resulting in an effective 25 frames per second. In North America (and other countries such as Japan) the power grid operates at 60hertz and so NTSC television signals are carried as 60 interlaced fields or 30 frames per second . Both these methods introduced a uniquely distinct visual aesthetic for the moving image which moved significantly away from that of established celluloid film. The resulting aesthetic of higher frame rates and interlacing was one that quickly took on cultural significance with the ‘TV-look’ being popularly associated and read by viewers as intrinsically connected to ideas of documentary, verbatim, reportage and authenticity. The TV aesthetic subsequently become a creative tool at the disposal of filmmakers.

This pattern of Invention as the Mother of Necessity, rather than the more commonly quoted inverse, is one that runs very much counter to Bazin’s assertion. It would be extremely difficult to argue that filmmakers prior to the invention of television and interlaced imagery in the 1950’s were proactively seeking such an aesthetic or the specific cultural resonance and visual language interlacing delivered. But regardless, once the technology delivered this new aesthetic possibility. filmmakers have been continually prompted to exploit it. One may look at feature narrative films such as Spike Lee’s ‘Bamboozled’ which combines 16mm film footage with MiniDV interlaced video to produce vastly different and contrasting visual aesthetics. The film centres on a ‘show with a show’ premise where by a TV studio show runner and his cast produce a satirical ‘black-face’ minstrel show. The scenes of the TV ‘show-within-the-show’ itself are shot 16mm and thus present a familiar narrative film aesthetic to the audience. However all scenes that depict the show’s making and the ‘real’ people who play the characters in the ‘show-within-a-show’ are shot with MiniDV. As a result the visual language of these sequences draws upon a cultural connection to interlaced imagery within the audience and their association with TV news, reporting, factual depiction and documentary rather than the glossy beauty of celluloid film.

Such an example, whereby a technological advance with a purely practical or external impetuous, becomes the sire of a new creative direction in cinema aesthetics is certainly not an isolated case. Indeed the very arguments and aesthetic championing of Bazin himself becomes paradoxical in this light. For Bazin the construct of Deep-Focus cinematography, whereby subjects at different distances from the camera lens could be held in consistent focus, was “a dialectical step forward in the history of film language” (Bazin 1967 cited in Monarco 1981, p330) And yet the deep-focus Bazin was so enamored by was a direct result of molecular chemistry. The development of faster film stocks with larger grain, and subsequently higher ISO ratings able to react faster to light, meant that camera lens apertures could be contracted without under-exposing. Smaller aperture results in deeper depth-of-field, sharp focus from foreground the background. From a chemical process deep-focus photography was born and glorious examples such as that in Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) stood for Bazin as the epitome of film-art.

It is possible that Bazin would argue that the idea and creative desire for deep-focus pre-existed its technical invention and the development of faster film stocks was simply the fulfillment of the idea that allowed that idea to be realized. However it is more likely that deep-focus was a side effect of a separate techno-creative impetus; one with a greater practical and economic imperative, particularly for the Hollywood studio system - Lighting. With slow film stocks enormous amounts of light (and lighting equipment) are required; the push for faster film stocks may been seen as more directly connected with economics scale efficiency of production than any creative desire. The unavoidable side-effect however was that once filmmakers ‘needed’ less light they were by-proxy given choice - choose to actually use less light or use the same amount of light and close down the aperture of the camera. The result with the later being deep-focus; perhaps not at all what the studios intended.

Certainly there is a greater set of economic and market intricacies influencing the development of cinema production, and the business models that drive it, then these simple examples. However, in any case, asserting, as Bazin does, that cinema is “only consequently technical” seems at best problematic and not holistically useful in any attempt to more fully understand cinema aesthetics or the relationship between cinema experience and the cinema process.

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Bordwell, D., 2005. Figures traced in light: on cinematic staging, Berkley: University of California press.

Bordwell, D., 2005. Film and the Historical Return. David Bordwell's website on cinema. Available at: http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/return.php [Accessed June 8, 2009].

Totaro, D., 2003. Andre bazin Revisited. André Bazin: Part 1, Film Style Theory in its Historical Context. Available at: http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/bazin_intro.html [Accessed June 8, 2009].

Monarco, J., 1981. How to read a film, New York: Oxford University Press.

Posted at 11:00PM Jun 14, 2009 by Mike Jones in moving image theory  |  Comments[1]