Mise-en-scène: Creating Rooms

This chapter clarifies the creative potential and critical dimensions of mise-en-scène through a close look at two films, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman 1975) and Exhibition (Hogg 2013). Both films portray women who are spatially and imaginatively enmeshed with and enraptured by their homes. While this situation is made clear in ways I shall explore, it is never explained. The directors organise their two architectures in ways which visually iterate something about the interiority of those who live inside them. They also conceal or look askance at that interiority thereby revealing it in non-direct and allusive ways. These modernist film texts resist critical attempts to summon up the metaphorical or psychological dimensions that traditional mise-en-scène criticism works to decipher. Akerman’s film also formulates a dispositif at work, and the chapter discusses how this works with mise-en-scène and its nature as a creative restraint. Despite the challenges these two films present to a mise-en-scène analysis that responds more readily to film texts which are openly and symbolically expressive, we can still arrive at a deeper understanding of such modernist films through this critical route.