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This chapter talks about how the game Heavy Rain shows why games must overturn the conventions of film if they hope to realize the dream of interactive cinema. It argues that the most important feature of Heavy Rain, the design choice that makes it more important than any other game in separating from rather than drawing games toward film, is its rejection of editing in favor of prolonging. It also examines the impact of mise-en-scène in the game. It argues that Heavy Rain does not embracefilmmaking but rebuffs it by inviting the player to do what Hollywood cinema can never offer: to linger on the mundane instead of cutting to the consequential.

This chapter analyzes the film's narrative in detailed sharp focus. It explores the film's plot and story as well as its mise-en-scène and the aesthetic principles underlying its composition. As To has indicated, the relationship between stasis and movement in film is for him an ideal property of his chosen field of creative work. In the case of PTU, this crucial balance between the two is achieved with great flair. To a considerable extent, of course, it is greatly facilitated by the natural rhythm of the subject matter. In other words, the film's narrative and aesthetic concept, its movement images and action images are predicated on the tempo of the police street patrol's progress through the “perilous night” of Tsim Sha Tsui. The chapter delineates the film's seven contiguous plot strands, which are theatrically interlinked in a way that is very unusual for contemporary cinema.

This chapter attempts to look into the film's artistry, as this is usually concealed by comedy. As observed through Chan's partnership in the United Filmmakers Organization (UFO), Chan had always recognized that collaborations play no small part in the filmmaking industry. The story, which was visualized by Chan and two of his UFO partners, was rooted in the paparazzi, the entertainment industry, and fandom. Mise en scène and editing generally determine the outcome of the film's visual language, and these prove to be important, since film is fundamentally a visual medium. Important elements include not only photography and camerawork lighting—depth of field, type of shot, angle, and perspective—but costumes, set dressing, time of day, and blocking and movement, as all these set the film's mood.

The Introduction situates the transnational new waves of the past half century within the context of economic and cultural globalization. It suggests that a particular mode of art cinema—one organized around mise en scène or the staged interaction of bodies, objects, and space—has become an important mechanism for documenting the material consequences of the expanding global market. That new wave mise en scène concentrates primarily on the visual culture of youth and cities, on an emerging cosmopolitan environment and its prototypical inhabitants. Finally, the Introduction establishes the relationship between this theoretical frame and the specific case studies at the core of the book: the French new wave of the 1950s and 1960s and the new cinemas from Taiwan and mainland China in the 1980s and 1990s.

This chapter introduces the concept of as it developed in the film criticism of the early French new wave, especially in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma. Critics like Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, and Rohmer highlighted the central role of the director as the author of a film, and “auteur theory” had a profound influence on the subsequent history of cinema and film studies. But this emphasis on authorship has obscured the key function of mise en scène for Cahiers critics who rediscovered the vision of the film artist only through assiduous attention to the staging of bodies, objects, and the environment within the frame. The auteur and mise en scène were imbricated concepts for these critics, and this chapter revisits the early careers of the key figures of the French new wave in order to rediscover the theoretical and aesthetic value of cinematic staging.

The “city film” has been a prominent genre in recent world cinema. This chapter examines that series as a global phenomenon and views Taiwan’s city films within both an international and a domestic context. It begins by asking what the city film was in the first half of the twentieth century and how the pressures of globalization have transformed both urban space and its representation in cinema. It then considers the specific circumstances of Taiwan’s new wave, with particular emphasis on films located in Taipei. The chapter concludes with the work of Edward Yang, especially Taipei Story, a film that features scenes of interior design and meditations on modern urban architecture. Yang’s films accentuate acts of design, and they suggest that many of the traits habitually associated with cinema, especially its artificiality and staginess, its constant destruction and reinvention of reality, are also the defining qualities of the global megacity.

This chapter deals with mise-en-scène and various kinds of movement in horror cinema. The film theory shaped by psychoanalysis and semiology treats images as static, symbolic components of underlying representational structures. It abstracts them from their moving, changing medium. Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, endorses Henri Bergson's ‘vitalism’, or the ubiquitous presence of dynamic forces in his work, with singularities of style and expression. The ‘movement-image’ in process replaces language-like symbolic representation at the crux of the filmic event. Beauty is located not in formal balance but in the kinesthetics of perpetual motion. Horror film foregrounds the dynamics of movement. In Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, for example, stasis is spectacularly defied. Even though a film's locale may be spatially constricted, as in a haunted house, movement still occurs. As well as its material force on the sensorium, horror film also opens up to the metaphysical elements of duration, via the special usage of light, spatial and temporal overlay, and other techniques.

Horror film fandom revels in the genre's special effects, but a corresponding theoretical exploration of horror aesthetics is scarce. The genre has showcased a strongly affective style from its outset. Excessive forms of cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing and sound are the pivotal tools of horror, used to arouse visceral sensations and to ‘horrify’ the viewer. The psychophysiology of cinematic experience and the ways in which vision and sound directly stimulate the nervous system are still under-researched. We can, however, usefully deploy Gilles Deleuze's philosophical speculations on the affective phenomena of mise-en-scène and movement. Deleuze's work does not focus on the genre of horror per se, but on some popular or sensationalist horror films. This book deals with the relationship of horror film and Deleuzian theory, focusing on the themes of madness and monstrous transformations, discussed via schizoanalysis and becoming, and horror film aesthetics, and also explores the value of Deleuzian work for horror film studies and suggests its future potential.

Deleuzian horror films threaten the stability of body and mind, transforming the embodied mind of the spectator as well as the bodies on screen. The horror movie, as its name suggests, is essentially movement. Instead of drawing representational equations, the image of the film moves in the human living image as part of the universal flux of matter. We are moved by, and move with, lighting, montage and the camera's motion in space and time. We are physically aroused by cinematography, editing and mise-en-scène. The images of viewer and film interlock in a machinic assemblage of movement-image. Horror films work the vibrations of sensory affect on our jarred and confused optic and aural nerves. The cinema books are part of Gilles Deleuze's wider philosophical project to assert that ‘the brain is the screen’ and to validate his interpretation of Henri Bergson's view of the universe as metacinema. Many horror films overtly present severely dysfunctional families and perverse sexuality. Psychoanalysis has provided substantial psycho-sexual templates to fit the fears and desires of horror, and has suggested their primal components.

La ciudad no es para mí (The City's Not For Me, 1965) was directed by Pedro Lazaga and starred theatre actor Paco Martínez Soria. This chapter analyses the ways La ciudad civilises the city of Madrid through its nostalgic appeal to the country. It pays particular attention to the way mise en scène, in particular the use of paintings and costume, is deployed to underscore the film's act of persuasion. If this short portrayal of a Swinging Sixties Madrid is insufficient to sabotage the ruralism otherwise promoted, its location at the opening of the film nonetheless announces a possible alternative reading from the very beginning. Furthermore, in terms of plot, La ciudad repeats a tired comedy formula (which popular film inherited from the popular theatre) of the trials and tribulations of a likeable paleto (country bumpkin) in a hostile city. The chapter argues that the ostensible aim of the film to civilise the city is projected onto an attempt to civilise women through the characterisation of the female protagonist.

This opening chapter will contextualise the ‘Duvivier style’. It will look at his chief formative influence, André Antoine, whose influential theories on cinematic naturalism, location shooting, and performance authenticity was cultivated and developed by Duvivier throughout his career. The chapter will examine what makes a Duvivier film. Historians often make reference to Duvivier’s love of ‘work well done’ as his signature legacy and enduring film-making ethos. The chapter will introduce the key recognisable Duvivier traits: an expressive mise en scène, fluid camera movement and a complex negotiation of décor, strong central performances by stars and new actors, pessimistic narratives, incorporation of melodramatic elements (music, production design), and a film-by-film reliability. This analysis of Duvivier, beyond its historical range, also proposes to engage with key debates in film studies: notably auteurism, stardom and audience reception. The chapter will also look at how Duvivier fits into a history of both French national cinema and international film production. Duvivier’s genre eclecticism and lack of a coherent corpus should not be seen as a negative; instead, it is necessary to read Duvivier’s wide-ranging approach to genre and subject matter as a response to and engagement with important development in French and international film praxis.

This chapter investigates how the world of ancient Rome is portrayed onscreen in the Spartacus series by assessing the physical sets—including the buildings and cities, interior design, and furniture—as well as the art direction in terms of color and costume design. With productions set in particular periods or places, the physical set and mise-en-scène provide vital clues as to when and where they are conceived as taking place. This chapter thus analyzes the distinctive look of the physical settings of the series, especially the villas and the cities (Capua, Sinuessa, and Rome), arguing that Spartacus offers a vision of a dark and turbulent new Rome that owes as much to contemporary thinking as to its past, both historical and cinematic.

Fashion is ubiquitous in the depiction of la Parisienne and demonstrates perhaps better than any other motif the variations within the type. These variations are reflected in the eclectic array of film genres in which a fashionable Parisienne appears. The association of la Parisienne with fashion can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when the image of the chic Parisienne was first exported, both throughout France and abroad, as an ambassador for French luxury goods and style. The relationship between la Parisienne and fashion is perpetuated in cinema primarily through the way the type is costumed, but also includes extra-cinematic considerations such as the actress/couturier relationship and the way a certain look, designed or self-styled, was achieved and marketed. Costume forms an integral part of the mise en scène in Parisienne films and has three primary functions: it denotes the elegance of the Parisienne, aids in periodising a film, and provides meaning beyond denotation by referencing a pre-existing iconography. The films examined in this chapter are: Jules Dassin’s Reunion in France, Stanley Donen’s Funny Face(1956), Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi, (1958), Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988), François Ozon’s 8 femmes (2001) and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle(1960).

The introduction argues that important, often obscured, aspects of postwar gay male life on film become legible when moving beyond a tight focus on issues of representation to consider how films and other associated texts have worked as forms of mediated elaboration. This emphasis allows for an elucidation of how affective dimensions of cultural production and performance not based solely in character development may work to extend certain ways of seeing, feeling and thinking. The introduction explores how a focus on spatiality, in particular, brings legibility to the importance of location and geography in the case studies explored throughout the book. It establishes the need for an analysis of mise-en-scène that emphasizes space as a means of understanding how the specter of the closet has rendered illegible forms of sociosexual contact that do not fit within popular teleological historical accounts organized around a powerful rhetorical conflation of the dichotomies pre-Stonewall/post-Stonewall and closeted/out. In arguing for an approach that is sensitive to this historical obfuscation, the introduction explores how phobic responses to HIV/AIDS have encouraged a moralized understanding of pre-1980s gay cinema as problematic site of sexual excess, resulting in a scholarly occlusion of this body of work.

This chapter turns its attention to Fatih Akin, who is one of the most prominent directors in Germany and Europe today. Gueneli argues that Akın's cinematic Europe challenges existing notions of a clear-cut and nationally-oriented Europe. In developing this argument, she looks at the specificities of sound and mise-en-scène, particularly in the road movie Im Juli (In July, 2000), but also references his more recent films. Akın's cinematic Europe features a connected and expanding European space. Akın's filmic visions of Europe contribute to the ongoing renegotiations of what constitutes Europe. The films construct a complex, cosmopolitan, tolerant, and mobile Europe, which promote ethnic, religious, and lingual diversity. This interconnectedness of a formerly divided European North/South and East/West is reflected through what Gueneli terms the aesthetics of heterogeneity in Akin's cinema.

Blurred voices, undefined and acousmatic; noise transformed into music; the backdrop of a world of imperceptible yet present sound; gimmicks brought about as quickly as they disappear; the fading of words, noise, and music; reverberations . . . These are the common practices of the mise en scène of sound, both in so-called auteur cinema and in more popular cinema. Yet such practices are more generally attributed to images, while sounds are relegated to the more concrete, enclosed and well-defined. This chapter interrogates the causes of a misunderstanding: the confusion of the principles of reproduction, fidelity and real sounds and the inability of theoretical categorisations to analyse the mise en scène of sound.

This chapter investigates the effects mirrors in films can have on the composition of a filmic image, the staging of a scene and the viewing activities of spectators. It discusses four such effects. (1) So-called ‘complex mirror shots’ can modify how spectators look onto the picture as a flat composition by way of a quasi-transformation of the screen shape. (2) They can function as a magnetizing frame-within-the-frame that channels the viewer’s look into the anterior depth of the mirror. (3) By referring spectators to off-screen space and thus making them look beyond the image into its lateral and posterior depth, some specific examples also allow for an intricately layered experience of perception and imagination, challenging and complicating efforts to “read” the image. (4) Finally, mirrors may be a source of spatial complication and can even lead to a full-blown disorientation regarding the status of the image, thus transforming the way viewers understand, problematize and look at the filmic image as such.