Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration

Letter from the Editor

Greg Chan — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Editorial to accompany Issue 8.2

Cinematic Narrative of Disability in Post Independent India: A Case Study of Mother India

Nilakshi Goswami — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Jenny Morris argues that cultural representations of disability mostly center on the feelings of the non-disabled and their reactions to disability, instead of focusing on the disability itself. Addressing Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957), a movie based on an agrarian society of Western Gujarat in the newly independent India, the paper examines the implied meaning of being disabled in a socialist society of India through its cinematic narrations. Post-independent Hindi popular cinema embraced farming life as its fundamental narrative trope to disseminate the idea of a self-sufficient independent nation, especially in the wake of Jawaharlal Nehru's Five-Year Plan for industrial development. Interspersed between nationalism and the myth of socialism, the subject of disability has, however, been overlooked over the years. This paper, thereby, examines the rural/peasant/agrarian nexus within the conflicting cinematic representations of the absent-disabled citizen as a lacuna in this newly emerging independent India.

The Pressure of Objects: Clutter and Class in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019)

Scott Szeljack — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 14:07:52 -0800

This essay explores the visual language of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019), critically examining Johnson’s use of clutter and sparsity in the spaces occupied by Harlan Thornberry (Christopher Plummer) and Marta (Ana de Armas) to argue the occupied visual space of the film parallels its class divide. This analysis explores Johnson’s use of clutter as a visual tension within the film, most prominently in the scene which plays out between Marta and Fran in the laundromat, where the stark lighting and extreme sparsity are visually unique in a film that otherwise litters its internal spaces with an excess of clutter. Careful analysis of the mise-en-scène of these objects reveals a consistent attitude towards class divide, a theme supported more broadly in the text of the film itself.

Chekhov’s Gun that Never Goes Off: Femininity and Castration in Jackie Brown (1997)

Clinton Barney — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 14:06:22 -0800

Feminist readings of Tarantino’s films generally investigate the placement of women within his hypermasculine storyworlds. Deriving from Schlipphacke’s reading of Inglorious Basterds, specifically her notion of feminine revenge, this essay will evaluate the gendered power dynamics in Jackie Brown (1997). While feminine revenge is obtained by Tarantino’s protagonists, the women become victims of their own desires, creating a vacuum of power in which the patriarchy unknowingly reinforces its own power. Examining the visual pattern created by Tarantino during the quickdraw sequence in Jackie Brown as a case study, this essay will investigate the lack of true feminine power within Tarantino’s storyworlds.

Identity, Authorship and Consumerism: An Interview with Moviemaker Jacob Gentry on the State of Cinema

Paul Risker — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 14:09:37 -0800

After Night Sky’s World Premiere at the August 2022 edition of FrightFest in London, Gentry spoke with MSJ about themes and ideas of identity and authorship in the cinema, and the influence of consumerism on the medium that we’ve only scratched the surface of.

An Interview with Steven DeLay, editor of Life Above the Clouds: Philosophy in the Films of Terrence Malick (SUNY, 2023)

Matthew Johnson — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 14:08:36 -0800

Philosophical perspectives have been a longstanding framework for addressing the films of Terrence Malick. While this discourse may, at first, appear exhaustive, philosopher Steven DeLay breathes new life into Malick studies here. In his approach, he offers nuanced and passionate insights into Malick’s work by discussing aesthetics, religion, philosophy, and the nature of cinema as art. As a brief introduction to his edited volume Life Above of the Clouds: Philosophy in the Films of Terrence Malick, this conversation with DeLay presents an equally personal and academic dialogue on this complex and elusive filmmaker, who seems to be as much admired as he is criticized. Nevertheless, DeLay’s volume, in addition to a range of other contemporary and forthcoming Malick texts prove that this conversation about Malick augurs a continuum of enriching and provocative study.

The Empty Vessel: Chronicles of the 'Unfed' Womb -- Examining Symbolic Female Bodies and the absence of Bodily Autonomy in Alien 3

Jordan Redekop-Jones — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Alien 3 (1992) explores what it means to be a woman in horror as defined solely by motherhood and womanhood. Following the devastating loss of maternal relationship between Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn) during a crash landing, the protagonist Ripley, must navigate the prisoner planet Fiorina 161 as the sole survivor and woman amongst violent convicts placed in isolation from society for their heinous acts against women. Director David Fincher uses a dark, isolated setting to explore the patriarchy’s definition of bodily autonomy through the abjection of an unwanted alien pregnancy, the void-like environment of the prison and the uncontrolled, fast paced violence of the prisoners and ‘rogue’ alien. This essay seeks to examine the concept of Barbara Creed’s ‘Monstrous Feminine’ as seen through the patriarchy’s fear of the parthenogenetic alien queen and the abject womb of Fiorina 161.

House of the Living Dolls: Set Design, the Gaze, and Miniaturization in Hitchcock’s Rear Window

Carolina Mesquita Rocha — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Perhaps no film has allegorized the filmgoing experience as succinctly—or as perversely—as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window; at least in the eyes of film critics and Hitchcockian scholars, for whom the 1954 film synthesizes the director’s enduring fascination with voyeurism by turning windows into movie screens and forcing us, the moviegoers, to see ourselves reflected in James Stewart’s less-than-flattering portrayal of a Peeping Tom. And yet, while it has become the most common interpretation of the gaze and set design in Rear Window, prompting the creation of a rich body of scholarship since the film’s release, the movie screen analogy offers only a fragmentary understanding of Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène and fails to account for the dehumanizing miniaturization that befalls the objects of Jeff’s (and our) gaze. A new reading—one which considers the single-set world of Rear Window as dollhouse-like—serves to resolve said critical gaps.