Research Topic Notes: The development of Mise-en-Scene

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Mise-en-scene research

“The main theory of Mise en Scene is how to manipulate a shot by framing and orchestrating the cuts and wielding the shots in an artistic bearing to achieve a cinematic masterpiece.” Mise En Scene – Film Theory

Film Lighting Research

Lighting in film study

The lighting setup guides the eye to a specific actor, prop, or part of a scene. Lighting reflects the psychology of characters. The amount, size, color, and harshness of light surrounding a character can be adjusted to match their emotions. Lighting defines and supports the genre of the film.

Film 101: Understanding Film Lighting – 2022 – MasterClass

Why Lighting Is Important

Lighting is a fundamental to film because it creates a visual mood, atmosphere, and sense of meaning for the audience. Whether it’s dressing a film set or blocking actors, every step of the cinematic process affects the lighting setup, and vice-versa.

  • Lighting tells the audience where to look. The lighting setup guides the eye to a specific actor, prop, or part of a scene.
  • Lighting reflects the psychology of characters. The amount, size, color, and harshness of light surrounding a character can be adjusted to match their emotions.
  • Lighting defines and supports the genre of the film. Lighting is the tool that conveys mood most clearly. For example, one of the film genres most known for its distinct lighting style is film noir, characterized by stark contrasts between light and dark, dramatically patterned shadows, and unique framing and composition choices.

What Is Cinematic Lighting?

Cinematic lighting is a film lighting technique that goes beyond the standard three-point lighting setup to add drama, depth, and atmosphere to the story. Cinematic lighting utilizes lighting tricks like bouncing light, diffusing light, and adjusting color temperatures.

 Moving Image Theory – Google Books >> p.g 152

“Lighting is one of the most powerful means of creating effect in film.Different cinematographers have commented on their experiments with different tpyes of lighting e.g. Mankiewitz 1986, Schaefer and Salvato 1984, Bordwell and Thompson  1990, Monaco 1977.

Film lighting and mood

The theory of lighting is a basic one, linked to numerous different situations, and the experience might not be derived from a small set of principles with unambiguous effects. Describing the physical or technical layout of a given type of lighting is fairly easy; it is often possible to get descriptions from some of the people arranging the lighting. The problem of the intended effects is a much thornier one. To describe the cognitive effects of lighting – for instance, the way in which given light enhances or impedes object recognition and object salience – in itself poses a series of problems for description. Mostly, however, the description of the effects of lighting is aimed at a larger endeavour, namely, to describe the way in which lighting aspectualises the emotional experience of a given scene, resulting in sad, scary, or euphoric experiences. Although such moods may be analysed in connection with an overall analysis of a given scene, it still raises the problem of how lighting contributes to mood. When cinematographers want to describe the effects of different types of lighting, they mostly use metaphors. Some of those are tactile (soft versus hard light, warm verses cold colours), others are muscular-kinetic: a given type of light provides a punch or a kick to the image. Such descriptions may not be just metaphoric in a vague sense but indications of ways that the viewer relates to given visual phenomena. To say hat the light is soft, and this also the objects illuminated with the soft light, may simply indicate the experience that the possible contact with the objects is evaluated as soft. To say that an image has got a punch may mean that the viewr has some low-level experiences of some qualities in the image that are dynamic and possibly suggest a “hard” interaction.

The Hardwired expressiveness of underlighting

In the article “The psychological foundations of culture” (Tooby & Cosmides 1992), John Tooby and Lesa Cosmides have shown how the social sciences for the last eighty years have been dominated by a culturalist paradigm. The dominant idea in this paradigm is that all human behaviour is a product of culture, that innate specifications and constraints have no part in the creation of human behaviour. Tooby and Cosmides provide a powerful criticism of the culturalist paradigm and show how cultural development takes place on the basis of a biological design that supports and enables but also puts some constraints on the cultural development.