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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 chapter details how Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men eschews the glamorous production values of the standard Hollywood film and moves into the transgressive realm of simulated reportage. It elaborates Children of Men's realism by Cuarón's incorporation of the handheld camera with uninterrupted long takes, complex compositions with multiple planes of action, and an emphasis on medium and long-distance shots rather than close-ups. It also analyses Children of Men's visual style that reflects the aesthetic of French film theorist Andre Bazin. The chapter discusses how Cuarón takes a 'present-in-the-future' approach to the mise-en-scène and insistently cross-references the nightmarish state-of-siege future with staged versions of historical, politically charged imagery. It examines Children of Men as a transhistorical critique.

This chapter examines Pedro Almodóvar's mise-en-scène and cinematography. Almodóvar's mise-en-scène is rich with intertextual references, whether it be from high culture, through the pastiche of other films, or through the mise-en-scène and the symbolism of props and costume. Heavily used visual motifs, such as 'the Matador', occur frequently in Talk to Her (2002), perhaps in homage and parody of the traditional Spanish iconography encouraged under the Franco regime. Similarly, Almodóvar is renowned for drawing upon and being influenced by Hollywood directors of the 1950s, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk, and one can see influences from both of these directors in the film through the performances, bright colour palettes, and themes. Like the melodrama films of the 1950s and like the cinema of Hitchcock, Almodóvar's unique and distinctive style is classified by a somewhat obsessive attention to mise-en-scène. This is most noticeable in the domestic settings. Almodóvar pays close attention to objects, colour, painting, and production design, much of which has deeper symbolism and meaning.

This chapter examines Nosferatu's (1922) style and form. In order to analyse a film thoroughly, one should always take into account the elements that constitute a film's grammar and syntax: mise-en-scène, camerawork, editing, and sound, although normally discussed separately, must be thought of as interconnected and inter-dependent. The mise-en-scène is constituted by a large number of different elements that can be roughly divided in pre-cinematic features (such as sets, costumes, light, etc.) and cinematographic elements (camera angles, distance, focus and so on). Despite having been produced in the early 1920s, Nosferatu, especially when watched in its original cut and with its tints and tones restored, is still an incredibly remarkable and powerful film. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's eye for complex and layered mise-en-scène and his rhythmical sense of editing confer to the film a compelling visual quality and a narrative that is both engaging and creepily uncanny. The chapter then looks at the most influential and interesting interpretations that have been attached to the film since its release.

This chapter presents a textual analysis of SAW (2004). The look of the SAW film is grimily distinctive; in contrast to the gloss that commercial horror often employs, SAW appears grotty and rancid. The glowing textures and the grimy mise-en-scène create a world that is hyper-real, yet visually compelling. The roots of the film's look would seem to lie within the gorgeous cinematography of 1980s Italian horror. SAW's day-glo chiaroscuro is expressive of the characters' broken subconscious; tenebrous psychological shadows that suggest shady misdeeds and guilt. Meanwhile, SAW's score is composed of incessant white noise; urgent metal throbs, scraping crescendos, empty rises. It is a soundscape that compliments the threatening atmospheres and urban backstages of the SAW universe. The main musical theme of SAW is the incidental score, 'Hello Zepp', a semi-classical piece that uses swelling strings and peaking synths to intense effect. 'Hello Zepp' is used within all of the subsequent SAW films to communicate the final victories of Jigsaw's creed, and also as part of the marketing campaign. With its iconography of harsh reverberations, the theme locates the film within the horror genre, while its swells and strings empower the narrative, adding grandeur to the film's squalor.

This chapter discusses the opening scenes of David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975). The exteriors and interiors of Starliner Tower, where the film is located, are played by Tourelle-Sur-Rive on Nuns' Island, a late work of the Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The structure of the building provides a physical framework for Cronenberg's choices in the film. The mise-en-scène and production design works with the shapes of the rooms made available to the production by their residents, and their existing décor, which the production had little budget to re-dress. This unity of location makes Shivers the last of three major Cronenberg films to begin, or double, as explorations of a built environment. The chapter then considers the film's plural identity as a Quebecois production made with English-Canadian state financing. It also introduces the characters of the story. In Shivers, as in most of Cronenberg's horror films, the source of the danger is private medicine, ‘private’ in both the ‘commercial’ and ‘personal’ senses.

This chapter discusses Mario Bava's debut feature film, Black Sunday, which is considered to be among the most stylish horror films ever made and won praise for its delicious look and cinematography. It illustrates Black Sunday's ravishing mise-en-scène that marries fairy tale to surrealist irrationality, as well as ingenious special-effects design. It also mentions Tom Milne, who summed up Bava's film as a chillingly beautiful and brutal horror film that is superb and a chiaroscuro symphony of dank crypts and swirling fog-grounds. The chapter recounts how Bava filmed on monochrome stock and delivered what is touted as the last great black-and-white Gothic horror picture. It talks about the clever effects and use of miniatures, matte paintings, grotesque character transformations and the painted backdrops in black-and-white that is fused together to create a magical air.