Executive Summary
The truth is not the fact, and the truth cannot be constructed. Since time, people have portrayed life as a truth, uncovering its “mysteries” and solving its science. What was once faith has turned to fact, yet the truth is, there isn't. Visual language has been implemented in society and cultures for a long time, for many it can even be seen as the first language, cave paintings, symbols. Along with many other forms such as sculptures, our most recent and most prevalent form of visual language is cinema. We will focus on cinema, as a means to uncover your own truth, and learn about others. Science is fact, but fact only leaves space for itself and nothing else. Cinema provides a means of art that was once lost, interpretation. Good art, good cinema, is cinema that can guide one to an understanding of their own life, through the viewing of someone else's constructed reality. The first step to understanding life is understanding art, and the first step to making art, is understanding that fact is not the same for all, and truth lies within, yet we can share our truths. Looking at all art would be too broad, too hard, instead looking at it through the frame of what can be the most impactful medium and language of this generation, visual language, mis-en-scene. Mis-en-scene, providing us with a sense of perspective that we could not have been given otherwise, providing us with realities more true than our own, allowing us to merge worlds and discover ourselves more, discover what we think of “blue”, what we think of “hot”. The artist's role in building a movie, building its movement, its color, in their truth, only to understand that their truth matters not, they are simply guiding us. Just as one may read their dreams, built by their unconscious, and understand their conscious world, one can look into the unconscious of others, the reality of others. This paper will also deal with understanding that art can vary in importance, and important art is art that relays a reality in order to strive for an understanding of a happy reality.
Post-Modern Cinema
To understand mis-en-scene and its importance in art, we must first think about hermeneutics, or the hermeneutics of film. You can look at both literature and film in both the same way, either through hermeneutics or poetics. I do not apologize for this take, but from what I have seen, for some reason post-modern art and cinema gets a bad reputation, that being said, I want to argue this through mis-en-scene. I will be upfront that we will understand the visual language through a post-modern focal point, as that is the time we are living in right now. According to Drew Casper, postmodernism in cinema is flawed in its sense of originality and respect for reality. While he does talk about how postmodernism is a reaction to modernism and it could not exist without it, the same goes for modernism, we know this because of thinkers like Heraclitus. On another level though, I believe that postmodernism has lived well before its coined term, which goes exactly back to postmodernity itself, ironic right. Before looking into that, I want to point out that the claim of postmodern cinema lacking reality is the exact battle that postmodernity as a whole is against, the true "truth" or the fact.
I won’t argue that David Hume was a post-modernist before post-modernism, as he was simply an influential thinker that helped develop both means of thought of both philosophies. Nietzsche being inspired through Hume, and inspiring post-modernism. “One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own Sentiment”, Hume argued the rationale of truth being whole, truth is beyond reason, and no amount of logic will ever attain truth. (Hume) Understanding hermeneutics from a cinema standpoint we need to understand that hermeneutics is just the interpretation of our own mind through the understanding of others. This brings us into understanding mis-en-scene, the act of creating a reality that I understand, in order to convey themes in relation to my time, that could help guide you through symbols, movement, colors, framing, visuals, in order for you to make your own understanding of your own theme in your own time. Akira Kurosawa said in an interview that he didn’t want to originally title his film Dreams, as for the Japanese he felt it sounded simple-minded, but he understood that this piece of art was to outlive his interpretation, and named it in accordance to a wider audience, the western world. Now this could be seen as a bad thing, because it kind of is, it’s a modernistic approach to naming a post-modern idea film. He took this formal aspect of ‘normality’ and used it in order to not abstract the western world. A large critique post-modernist have with modernism is the lack of cultural respect it has because of aspects like this. He also talks about how in the past he would get backlash from critics that his portrayal of women, being amazing and strong, was unrealistic. But to Kurosawa, this is simply how he saw women, and he output this into his art, and that was seen
I’m not one to say to reject all themes from my time, yet if one wants to understand where they come from, they can, however, there is not single means of thought. I will begin to explain mis-en-scene, and how it ties in relation to post-modernism, truth, reality, and good art.
Mis-En-Scene
Before gauging this theory of mis-en-scene being the most important form of art as well as a form of art unlike any other that can tap into the unconscious mind and provide real change in perspective and truth, as well as what universal truth means, if it exists, we must understand what mis-en-scene is, how it works.
Mis-en-scene, meaning ‘to stage’, is about movement on a screen. Being rooted in theatre, mis-en-scene has been alive since the first play. This would be the directors strength, a highlight in art that merges form, hence the medium, the channel, film as a medium. The director, for the most part, does not create the base of the art, yet enhances it, which is all the more important. The director gives space, gives life, gives art a reality. A painting, still, in its time and place, a song trapped in its audio-dimensional world. Mis-en-scene creates movement, and movement is second-hand to life. In life, there is unconscious movement, you watch the train pass by as you listen to the music playing in your headphones. Film contains and controls that environment, yet on a larger scale, it can create its own environment. The beauty of mis-en-scene, the main point, the main idea, is to successfully create a reality through repeated movements, understanding the normalities and truths of that world that has been constructed by another human. A good director forms a reality that is recognizable not by your own, but by your unconscious mind. We will take a look at a couple different films in order to recognize the strength in building reality and controlling movement. Understanding that these built together create dreams, dreams that are made to be interpreted by your own sense, through the viewing of someone else's truth. “Where does the film come alive? It’s- for example, you have a sequence, and the gap between that sequence and the next. It’s in those gaps between one scene and the next that the film comes alive…” a direct quote from director Akira Kurosawa, having known Lyotard's writing or not, he does not credit this to Lyotard, in so I believe that if such a genius mind as his, genius being someone able to bring their emotion to life, understands that the life comes through the comparison, through the movement, and not the moment, then that feeling is true.
Although the argument is seemingly a post-modern way of thought, if this even exists, the two can coexist. Movies have genres, grouping them together, there is a common form amongst people and that needs to be recognized, however, that does not make it any better or worse. We will look at mis-en-scene through two different methods that coexist with one another, poetics and hermeneutics. The poetic means of mis-en-scene from the popular basis could trace back to the origins formed such as continuity editing, a form of editing used that understands time and space as a construct of the reality of the masses, a seamlessly cut film. Formal aspects like this can coexist with more ‘experimental’ or ‘abstract’ aspects such as color theory, the two can coexist and stand alone whenever they want as curated by the director. Take Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), this film as a whole is shot in chapters, jumping from space to space. These jumps traverse us through Kurosawa’s dreams, they have meaning with one another, however, inside these chapters, the time and space is seemingly normal just as any other film we would watch, the cuts are textbook. What makes this film different is the colors that are used, the surrealist look of the film, its a reality beyond my reality, your reality, everyone's reality but Kurosawa’s. While he may have made this to strive for us to understand his reality in a certain time and place, the truth is, a film this beautiful can create a reality that could reflect any reality that it meets in the future or past. This film, to the viewer, does not relay the convention of, “how was this film made”, rather, “what does this film make me feel”. Or atleast, the initial feeling, someone who may find interest in that would find that their interest comes second to their subconscious emotion.
Before we look into the reading of some films that reflect the directors reality vs the viewers reality, we should look into some authors who have written about this subject before. Books like Death of the Author provide us insight on thinking about how art should be interpreted and categorized. A main aspect of post-modernism being the death of the author. Although Barthes was a thinker before post-modernism was born, he thought structurally. Barthes kills the Author-God way of thinking, while he might push this extreme or some may interpret it that way, it merely is, to me, just thinking of a way that we can think of art as belonging to a place where we can have many interpretations which allows for a progressive lifestyle for society. We can see a mistake in the interpretation of art as existing for an in a single reasoning with excerpts from Art on the Frontlines that talk about how a look into art in this way could help provide a means of confrontation with not only themselves, but a means for society to move together as a whole. Understanding why and where these slave songs were coming from, listening to it from their realities, might help you rethink your reality in a positive way as a cohesive society.
What's Mine, Is Yours
Knowing that mis-en-scene comes through its end as a means of communication, we can now talk about how one can or should understand this language. Lyotard believed in thinking of mis-en-scene as a language similar to interpreting dreams. Mis-en-scene is read in a way similar to how we psychoanalyze dreams. When you analyze your dream, where you were positioned, who you saw in your dream, it's almost as if you have created a set in your mind, an unconscious set used to determine your subconscious thought, the thought that lies within, your soul. Directors are certainly like dream curators, they create realities based on their practice in genius of the chaos that we constantly see in our own realities. We have similar realities, that’s a fact, even if my interpretation of one thing may be different than yours, it may also be the same, but the fact is that we both see the same thing, maybe. Sometimes you don’t and that's the beauty of self interpretation.
I want to look at the film, An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) as the case study for this theory. The reason I choose this film and not a surrealist or experimental film is because I want to show that even in the most basic formal film, there is still a hermeneutics aspect that goes into reading the analysis of a film and it is very important for the viewer. This film can be compared to very realist films, genres such as neo-realism. The editing of the film is for the most part very structuralist. It takes past cinema, and the use of continuity, to string together a cohesive and seamless reality, one that is mundane, a reality closer to what we would expect. Aside from the intercuts of the different storylines that would eventually meet together, the film being so basic is, to me, what has me so intrigued. This depressive state of the film is made by someone far from my own culture, my own understanding, yet, his depiction of this reality, one that seems so very real, is so very relatable in a sense. Learning to understand this relation through my own interpretation before knowing the author's intent is part of the beauty. The director has successfully been able to give you a dream so potent that it makes you think about certain aspects of your own life in reflection.
Now compare this to a film like Signal 8 (2019) where the structure is not formal, we almost see this reality through the view of someone else entirely unable to comprehend what they want to convey but at the same time forming our own understanding of what we see. These compilation of clips precisely spliced and colored one can still for individual ideas of what it means to them, and reflect on what it could mean to the artist, in order to understand what it might mean for their life. Reasoning with art, because reality cannot tell the truth. Letterboxd user Yongene Wong having the most liked comment under the film, “This film never felt political at all, no, but one can help but feel that Liu (the director) is gesturing towards the inevitable China takeover and the loss of a city that is so endearly captured in this short”. A film that has no linguistic narrative other than its visuals, holding the power to convey a message as strong as this without words, maybe even stronger than what the reviewer has said but only reduced to words for the sake of quick understanding, a viewing of the art giving us a deep understanding. We can then reflect that with how the film made us feel ourselves, and compare with others, forming our own truth.
Conclusion
Mis-en-scene holds a language more powerful than words can explain, this visual medium being one of the strongest mediums we have today has made changes in this world bad and good. This language however, can only be used at full potential with the thought of taking in what the director has curated, the director's world, only as a tool to guide our own, just as the director uses their tools from the past to create this world. True, good cinema allows for a progressive society, a society in which no minority of culture is left out of a canon, left out of the “formal structure”. Language does not define humanity, although many people create visual language and cinema, that does not mean one's accent or style is better than the other, merely that we all have our own accents that allow others to discover theirs. Truth is built through the abstraction of chaos, chaos that surrounds us through visuals. Reasoning has no reason when there can be no fact that is all the same, my blue is different from yours, but that doesn’t mean its less important nor does it mean its more important.
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