Adrian Martin

Styles of filmmaking have changed greatly from the classical Hollywood system, with its emphasis on narrative and character, to the current digital era of YouTube and installation art, where audiovisual spectacle takes command. The ways in which film critics and scholars have analysed these transformations in film style have also often changed. This book explores two central style concepts from the history of audiovisual criticism and theory, mise en scène and dispositif, to illuminate a wide range of film and new media examples. It argues that we need an open, inclusive and truly international approach to understand anew both old and current film and media works.

From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art

Mise en Scène and Film Style

Rick Powell

"Mise en scène can transform the elements of a given scene; it can transform a narrative’s destination; it can transform our mood or our understanding as we experience the film. Style is not a supplement to content; it makes content – and remakes it, too, in flight." (Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style)

"It is facile (although a widespread reflex) to reduce themes in film to banal proverbs, truisms or messages (like ‘war is hell’ or ‘overcome your fear to become yourself’) – something that bad films tend to do, as well. But theme – what Legrand calls semanticity – is what gives symbolic depth and weight to the basic building-blocks of story, character and fictional world." (Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style)

"Style is what articulates, modulates and develops a thematic structure/pattern. And a theme – precisely as a living, mobile structure rather than an inert, reducible token or template – is more like a question (I think of it as the driving semantic question of a work) than a statement, thus creating a structure of multi-layered contrasts, comparisons and ongoing considerations that get weighed up in the course of a film." (Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style)

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