When asked to create a thematic studio course, the first idea that came to mind was mise-en-scène. If you are new to the term, it comes from the French, meaning 'put on stage.' It may sound obvious—something that theater set designers or perhaps a film director need to worry about. But as a painter, writer, or musician, mise-en-scène is just as crucial. Understanding how to break down the elements of a medium will heighten what is called suspended disbelief, the thing that makes a created world believable or cohesive. An artist with a grasp on MES (mise-en-scène) has more control over things like the defamiliarization effect, or elements that defamiliarize a viewer to the world you created. Think of Kafka's bug, or the soundtrack in Yorgos Lanthimos' 2023 film Poor Things by Jerskin Fendrix.
For example, if we look at painting, writing, and music some aspects to consider would be paying attention to perspective, floors, windows, edges, chord structures, pitch shifts, instrumentation, lighting, recording quality, brush strokes, line breaks, sentence length, and guitar tone, etc.
I won't teach a lecture on mise-en-scène here, but basically for film, MES considers:
Props Set Design Costume Makeup
Color Lighting Blocking Framing
Lenses Sound Frame Rate Music
Studio Binder is a great resource for more information on this and other topics concerning film. As mentioned, I take this all-encompassing concept and apply it to not only literature—the movies that we make in our minds while reading (Refer back to my first blog post Musicality of Text to learn how our minds are creating the soundscapes for what we read) but also music, and visual art in general.
So all that to say. I've decided to try a project where I draw movie stills (my goal is to draw 100—1 for every year of the 20th century, we'll see if I get that far) in pencil, paying attention to the MES—the angle, the objects in frame, the costumes, the lighting. I don't use any measuring device or grid. All is done by eye. I think something fascinating happens in art when a certain art object is transferred/filtered/processed through a human with limitations. Equipped with only my pencil, paper, and eye, I begin translating the image. In the process, I noticed things I wouldn't have seen while watching the movie. Drawing a still frame is like playing the film at –x10000 speed. For example, I never noticed all the little Keanu Reeve faces reflected in the hand in the Matrix still below.
The Matrix (1999)
Or how the guy in the back left of this famous Truman Show director moment is eating a burrito of some kind. And how the director in the center has such a defined square mouth shape going on. And the man dressed in a tuxedo in the back right having a serious conversation.
The Truman Show (1998)
I could write my PhD dissertation on the film below. Ashes and Diamonds (1958) directed by Andrzej Wadja. Set the last day of World War Two in Poland, the main character, brilliantly acted by Zbigniew Cybulski, is wearing out-of-era sunglasses, which he refused to take off during shooting, and in my opinion, makes the film all the more intriguing and strange.
Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
Film is a fascinating medium because it also involves several iterations of the product in writing. Most obviously, there is the script. There are also storyboards, shot lists, and dozens of other lists made by costume designers, set designers, and coffee runners. A film is an amalgam of words on papers executed with various equipment. In a way, what I am doing is backward storyboarding, but instead of making a story with one film (that would be quite tedious) I want to see how one frame per year of cinema next to other frames from other years tell a story (filtered through me) and placed in drawings on paper on a wall. What story could be told with all sorts of stills juxtaposed next to one another? Already, here in this blog, Matrix next to Truman Show next to Ashes and Diamonds, creates a mini vignette full of tension, power, control, and off-camera gazes. ,
Also, note the limitations—my eyes and hand are the camera, the pencil is the film, which has now been digitized and pixelated so that you can see these drawings from wherever you are.
Well there we have it. I will keep drawing films for as long as I find them interesting.
Comentários