Mise en Scène and Film Style

Adrian Martin is Professor of Film Studies at Goethe University, Germany, and Monash University, Australia. His books include Phantasms, Once Upon a Time in America, The Mad Max Movies, Last Day Every Day and What is Modern Cinema?. He is co-editor of the online film journal LOLA and the book Movie Mutations.

"The book serves as a most valuable reference work on what has long remained a loosely defined aspect of cinema and a masterclass in audiovisual analysis that teachers and writers on cinema will benefit from re-reading. It ought to find a place in any library of film writing ... ." (yusef sayed, yswriting.wordpress.com, February, 2016) 'A wonderfully ambitious and erudite work that will require multiple re-readings to absorb and retain its generous profusion of ideas.' - Girish Shambu, www.girishshambu.blogspot.co.uk 'The fact is, this highly optimistic and constructive book seeks to use 'mise en scene,' whatever its past limitations (and variable meanings within separate film cultures, which the book is quite attentive to), as a sort of construction site on which to build other tools of analysis, which are outlined in the four final chapters: 'Sonic Spaces,' 'A Detour via Reality: Social Mise en scene,' 'Cinema, Audiovisual Art of the 21st Century,' and 'The Rise of the Dispositif'. At once dense and highly accessible, this book is an impassioned battle cry for the future of film art grounded in an expanded and sharpened view of its critical history.' - Jonathan Rosenbaum 'Representing more than two decades of remarkably deep, passionate labor within the world of cinema, Mise en Scene and Film Style is at once a boldly panoramic survey and a work of fine-grained formal analysis. The twin aims of his study to offer a new global 'history of forms in cinema' and a fresh approach to mise en scene as the lens through which to understand film history send him and his readers on a whirlwind journey that ultimately does justice to the audacious scope promised in the book's subtitle.' - Noah Isenberg, Film Comment 'Gathering together a seemingly inconsonant collection of texts in its broad-armed embrace, the Australian-born scholar Adrian Martin's new volume Mise en Scene and Film Style is a virtuosic act of synthesis, and a destroyer of false dichotomies.' - Nick Pinkerton, Sight and Sound 'Profoundly well-informed, erudite, and incisive, but also loping, witty, and passionate, the book sheds light not just on a notoriously slippy concept but also on the endless possibilities of cinema experience.' - David Greven, Cineaste

• Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Prologue: At the Ballet Ruse 1. A Term That Means Everything, and Nothing Very Specific 2. Aesthetic Economies: The Expressive and the Excessive 3. What Was Mise en scène? 4. The Crises (1): Squeezed and Stretched 5. The Crises (2): The Style It Takes 6. Sonic Spaces 7. A Detour via Reality: Social Mise en scène 8. Cinema, Audiovisual Art of the 21st Century 9. The Rise of the Dispositif Epilogue: Five Minutes and 15 Seconds with Ritwik Ghatak Notes Bibliography